Top 60 T.E. Lawrence Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

— T.E. Lawrence

2. “Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.”

— T.E. Lawrence

3. “Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.”

— T.E. Lawrence

4. “It is difficult to keep quiet when everything is being done wrong, but the less you lose your temper the greater your advantage. Also then you will not go mad yourself.”

— T.E. Lawrence

5. “The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.”

— T.E. Lawrence

6. “Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day.”

— T.E. Lawrence

7. “I wrote my will across the sky, in stars.”

— T.E. Lawrence

8. “He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed...”

— T.E. Lawrence

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “Half a calamity is better than a whole one.”

— T.E. Lawrence

13. “If you wear Arab things, wear the best. Clothes are significant among the tribes, and you must wear the appropriate, and appear at ease in them. Dress like a Sherif, if they agree to it.”

— T.E. Lawrence

14. “To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.”

— T.E. Lawrence

15. “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

16. “This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.”

— T.E. Lawrence

17. “Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown! Lawrence: We can’t all be lion tamers.”

— T.E. Lawrence

18. “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

19. “To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.”

— T.E. Lawrence

20. “The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.”

— T.E. Lawrence

21. “To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one’s tail.”

— T.E. Lawrence

22. “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

23. “The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.”

— T.E. Lawrence

24. “Do not try and do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not win it for them.”

— T.E. Lawrence

25. “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

26. “If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.”

— T.E. Lawrence

27. “The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.”

— T.E. Lawrence

28. “The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.”

— T.E. Lawrence

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.”

— T.E. Lawrence

35. “I prefer lies to truth, especially when the lies are about me.”

— T.E. Lawrence

36. “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

37. “The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.”

— T.E. Lawrence

38. “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

39. “All men dream: but nor 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 their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore! a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts.”

— T.E. Lawrence

40. “Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.”

— T.E. Lawrence

41. “The vicarious policemanship which was the strongest emotion of Englishmen towards another man’s muddle, in their case was replaced by the instinct to pass by as discreetly far as possible on the other side.”

— T.E. Lawrence

42. “Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.”

— T.E. Lawrence

43. “There is an ideal standard somewhere and only that matters and I cannot find it. Hence the aimlessness.”

— T.E. Lawrence

44. “Life in mass was sensual only, to be lived and loved in its extremity. There could be no rest-houses for revolt, no dividend of joy paid out. Its spirit was accretive, to endure as far as the senses would endure, and to use each such advance as base for further adventure, deeper privation, sharper pain. Sense could not reach back or forward. A felt emotion was a conquered emotion, an experience gone dead, which we buried by expressing it.”

— T.E. Lawrence

45. “Off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage that swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came to like a drawn sword and smote us speechless.”

— T.E. Lawrence

46. “Beduin proverb that a deserted head showed an ungenerous mind:.”

— T.E. Lawrence

47. “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

48. “A thick headcloth forms a good protection against the sun, and if you wear a hat your best Arab friends will be ashamed of you in public.”

— T.E. Lawrence

49. “The Beduin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his sour this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free.”

— T.E. Lawrence

50. “The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.”

— T.E. Lawrence