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

More quotes by 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.
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I wrote my will across the sky, in stars
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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.
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Cling tight to your sense of humour. You will need it every day.
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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.
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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.
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The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.
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Club Secretary: I say, Lawrence. You are a clown! Lawrence: We can't all be lion tamers.
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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.
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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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To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin.
T. E. Lawrence
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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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Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
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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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.
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The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.
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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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Your success will be proportioned to the amount of mental effort you devote to it.
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Half a calamity is better than a whole one.
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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