T. E. Lawrence
T. E. Lawrence
Thomas Edward Lawrence CB DSO FASwas a British author, archaeologist, military officer, and diplomat. He was renowned for his liaison role during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign and the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia—a title used for the 1962 film based on his wartime activities...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionSoldier
Date of Birth16 August 1888
The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.
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.
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.
Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown! Lawrence: We can't all be lion tamers.
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.
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands/and wrote my will across the sky in stars
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.
Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.
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.
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.
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.
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 I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.
The printing press is the greatest weapon in the armoury of the modern commander.