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
Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
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.
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 to artist Eric Kennington, May 1935 )
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.
The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor.
I've been & am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen & I'm quite ordinary, & will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
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.
We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.
Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown! Lawrence: We can't all be lion tamers.
The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.
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.
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.
The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.