T. E. Lawrence famous quotes

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Inspirational #Success #Dream

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Desert #Creeds

To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one's tail.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#News #Tin #Tails

To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Waste #Action #Sin

The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Weapons #Modern #Printing

Mankind has had ten-thousand years of experience at fighting and if we must fight, we have no excuse for not fighting well.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Fighting #Years #No Excuses

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
-- T. E. Lawrence

#World #Revision #Firsts

The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Book #Interesting #Healthy

You wonder what I am doing? Well, so do I, in truth. Days seem to dawn, suns to shine, evenings to follow, and then I sleep. What I have done, what I am doing, what I am going to do, puzzle and bewilder me. Have you ever been a leaf and fallen from your tree in autumn and been really puzzled about it? That’s the feeling. (T.E. Lawrence to artist Eric Kennington, May 1935 )
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Sleep #Autumn #Artist

The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Looks

It seems to me that the conquest of the air is the only major task for our generation.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Our Generation #Air #Generations

Yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to remake it in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#War #Winning #Men

Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Dream #Eye #Open Eyes

I haven't got a heart: only the former site of one, with a monument there to say that it has been removed and the area it occupied turned into a public garden, in pursuance of the slum-clearance scheme.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Heart #Garden #Site

Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Contentment #Literature #Misery

I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly,
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Moving #Writing #Hours

The dreamers of the day are dangerous... for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Dream #Eye #May

In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade.... The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Military #Army #Men

There is an ideal standard somewhere and only that matters and I cannot find it. Hence the aimlessness.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Aimlessness #Matter #Standards

They taught me that no man could be their leader except he ate the ranks' food, wore their clothes, lived level with them, and yet appeared better in himself.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Military #Men #Clothes

Half a calamity is better than a whole one.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Half #Calamity

We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Beautiful #Spring #Military

We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Feelings #Nerves #Wave

I wrote my will across the sky, in stars
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Stars #Sky

As long as the arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Silly #Fighting #Long

It seemed that rebellion must have an unassailable base, something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it: such a base as we had in the Red Sea Parts, the desert, or in the minds of the men we converted to our creed.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Men #Sea #Mind

I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#People #Ordinary #Artistic

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#People #Honor #England

Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose; but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Men #Land #Desert

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Years #Evil #Heaven

Isn't it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it's we who led our parents on to bear us, and it's our unborn children who make our flesh itch.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Children #Believe #Parent

A skittish motorbike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Animal #Blood #Hints

Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Book #Tests #Nine

If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Tired #Listening

He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed...
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Wise #Tired #Old And Wise

He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Art #Maturity #Skills

I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands/and wrote my will across the sky in stars
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Stars #Men #Hands

Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Judging #Immortality #Immorality

I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and was become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Loneliness #Taken #Men

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#Fate #Men #Hands

An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot. The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one, and Salammbo is the classical text-book instance.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#War #Book #Finals

To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
-- T. E. Lawrence

#War #Knives #Soup

Suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert
-- T. E. Lawrence

#War #Army #Ideas