64 Powerful T.E. Lawrence Quotes to Inspire You
8. “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
Military Ethics, Leadership, Personal Connection, Strategic Criticism, Moral Dilemma
10. “The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.”
T.E. Lawrence Religious Philosophy, Asceticism, Semitic Creeds, Materialism, Cultural Criticism
11. “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 Rebellion Strategy, Security, Ideology, Geography, Psychological Warfare
12. “We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.”
T.E. Lawrence War Experience, Victory, Disillusionment, Generational Conflict, Cyclical History
13. “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 Identity Crisis, Loneliness, Contempt, Cultural Reference, Existential Thoughts
14. “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 Cultural Criticism, English Behavior, Non-intervention, Social Commentary, National Character
17. “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 Life Philosophy, Sensuality, Revolution, Endurance, Emotional Experience
22. “There was among the tribes in the fighting zone a nervous enthusiasm common, I suppose, to all national risings, but strangely disquieting to one from a land so long delivered that national freedom had become like the water in our mouths, tasteless.”
T.E. Lawrence Nationalism, Freedom, Cultural Contrast, Perception, Revolution
23. “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 Existential Confusion, Purpose, Life’s Mystery, Nature Metaphor, Self-reflection
29. “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 Technology, Freedom, Excess, Sensory Experience, Modernity
