Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I wrote my will across the sky, in stars
Half a calamity is better than a whole one.
Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.
The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.
He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed.
Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.
To have news value is to have a tin can tied to one's tail.
I could write for hours on the lustfulness of moving Swiftly.
I prefer lies to truth, especially when the lies are about me.
Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day.
The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.
To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.
This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.
To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.
The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.
The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.
Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.
The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.
It seems to me that the conquest of the air is the only major task for our generation.
The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.
Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown! Lawrence: We can't all be lion tamers.
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands/and wrote my will across the sky in stars
There is an ideal standard somewhere and only that matters and I cannot find it. Hence the aimlessness.
Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers, terrible: a death in life.
The dreamers of the day are dangerous... for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor.
Mankind has had ten-thousand years of experience at fighting and if we must fight, we have no excuse for not fighting well.
As long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do not try to 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 to win it for them.
The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn, for, in everything but wits and knowledge, the Arab is generally the better man of the two.
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.
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.
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.
When I am angry, I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie forever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.
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.
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.
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!
I've been and am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen and I'm quite ordinary, and will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.