Top 60 T.E. Lawrence Quotes (2025 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

Featured in: Deep Quotes About Life, Quotes About Dreams, Vision Quotes

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

— T.E. Lawrence

5. “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

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. “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

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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

12. “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

13. “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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

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

— T.E. Lawrence

16. “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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

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

— T.E. Lawrence

19. “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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

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

— T.E. Lawrence

22. “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

23. “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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

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

— T.E. Lawrence

26. “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

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

32. “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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

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

— T.E. Lawrence

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

— T.E. Lawrence

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

— T.E. Lawrence

41. “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

42. “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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

44. “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

45. “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

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

— T.E. Lawrence

47. “It seems to me that the conquest of the air is the only major task for our generation.”

— T.E. Lawrence

48. “My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.”

— T.E. Lawrence

49. “I was unable to take the professional view that all successful actions were gains. Our rebels were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our leadership. We were not in command nationally, but by invitation; and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army. Even from a purely military point of view the assault seemed to me a blunder.”

— T.E. Lawrence

50. “We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives.”

— T.E. Lawrence