T. E. Lawrence Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“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 -
“This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one's tail.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“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 -
“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 -
“The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“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 -
“The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“It seems to me that the conquest of the air is the only major task for our generation.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“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 -
“Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“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 -
“Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly,”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“The dreamers of the day are dangerous... for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“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 -
“There is an ideal standard somewhere and only that matters and I cannot find it. Hence the aimlessness.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“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 -
“Half a calamity is better than a whole one.”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“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 -
“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 -
“I wrote my will across the sky, in stars”
-- T. E. Lawrence -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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