69 Quotes by T. E. Lawrence

The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.

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

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

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 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.

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.

I wrote my will across the sky, in stars

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

Suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. We might be a vapour, blowing where we listed Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast, unknown desert