64 Quotes by T.E. Lawrence

Some of the speed and secrecy of our victory, and its regularity, might perhaps be ascribed to this double endowment’s offsetting and emphasizing the rare feature that from end to end of it there was nothing female in the Arab movement, but the camels.

As long as the arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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