64 Quotes by T.E. Lawrence

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.

We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.

We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.

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. – T. E. Lawrence Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.

Author says he suffered from both "a craving to be famous" and "a horror of being known to like being known.

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

We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.

All men dream but not equally those who dream by night in the dirty 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 on their dreams with open eyes to make them possible T.E. Lawrence