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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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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
Much
Perfectly
Winning
Help
War
Helping
Hands
Tolerably
Better
Arabs
Trying
Arabia

More quotes by T. E. Lawrence

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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.
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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Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
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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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 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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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.
T. E. Lawrence
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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.
T. E. Lawrence
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I've been and am absurdly over-estimated. There are no supermen and I'm quite ordinary, and will say so whatever the artistic results. In that point I'm one of the few people who tell the truth about myself.
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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If I could talk it like Dahoum, you would never be tired of listening to me.
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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The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.
T. E. Lawrence
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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.
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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The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.
T. E. Lawrence
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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.
T. E. Lawrence
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I haven't got a heart: only the former site of one, with a monument there to say that it has been removed and the area it occupied turned into a public garden, in pursuance of the slum-clearance scheme.
T. E. Lawrence
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Half a calamity is better than a whole one.
T. E. Lawrence
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The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.
T. E. Lawrence