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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!

T. E. Lawrence

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T. E. Lawrence
Age: 46 †
Born: 1888
Born: August 16
Died: 1935
Died: May 19
Aircraft Pilot
Anthropologist
Archaeologist
Autobiographer
Castellologist
Diplomat
Military Officer
Military Personnel
Screenwriter
Spy
Thomas Edward Lawrence
Lawrence of Arabia
of Arabia Lawrence
John Hume Ross
T.E. Lawrence
Thomas Edward Shaw
First
Conception
Ornament
Thing
Architecture
Revision
World
Details
Ornaments
Save
Draft
Failing
Affects
Comes
Detail
Firsts
Fails
Come
Alas

More quotes by T. E. Lawrence

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Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.
T. E. Lawrence
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The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.
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If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.
T. E. Lawrence
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To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
T. E. Lawrence
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Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
T. E. Lawrence
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Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day.
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Immorality, I know. Immortality, I cannot judge.
T. E. Lawrence
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The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.
T. E. Lawrence
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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.
T. E. Lawrence
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The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.
T. E. Lawrence
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The Beduin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his sour this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free.
T. E. Lawrence
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As long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.
T. E. Lawrence
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Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.
T. E. Lawrence
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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.
T. E. Lawrence
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Men have looked upon the desert as barren land, the free holding of whoever chose but in fact each hill and valley in it had a man who was its acknowledged owner and would quickly assert the right of his family or clan to it, against aggression.
T. E. Lawrence
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Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown! Lawrence: We can't all be lion tamers.
T. E. Lawrence
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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.
T. E. Lawrence
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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
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Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.
T. E. Lawrence
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Mankind has had ten-thousand years of experience at fighting and if we must fight, we have no excuse for not fighting well.
T. E. Lawrence