Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.
There is an ideal standard somewhere and only that matters and I cannot find it. Hence the aimlessness.
The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.
I wrote my will across the sky, in stars.
The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.
My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.
Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.
Since the adventure some of those who worked with me have buried themselves in the shallow grave of public duty.
We had deluded ourselves that perhaps peace might find the Arabs able, unhelped and untaught, to defend themselves with paper tools. Meanwhile we glozed our fraud by conducting their necessary war purely and cheaply. But now this gloss had gone from me. Chargeable against my conceit were the causeless, ineffectual deaths of Hesa. My will had gone and I feared to be alone, lest the winds of circumstance, or power, or lust, blow my empty soul away.
We pay for these things too much in honour and in innocent lives.
Off the white town hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage that swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came to like a drawn sword and smote us speechless.
All men dream: but nor equally, those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore! a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts.
There was among the tribes in the fighting zone a nervous enthusiasm common, I suppose, to all national risings, but strangely disquieting to one from a land so long delivered that national freedom had become like the water in our mouths, tasteless.
I was unable to take the professional view that all successful actions were gains. Our rebels were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting our leadership. We were not in command nationally, but by invitation; and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army. Even from a purely military point of view the assault seemed to me a blunder.
Some of the speed and secrecy of our victory, and its regularity, might perhaps be ascribed to this double endowment’s offsetting and emphasizing the rare feature that from end to end of it there was nothing female in the Arab movement, but the camels.
Beduin proverb that a deserted head showed an ungenerous mind:.
The vicarious policemanship which was the strongest emotion of Englishmen towards another man’s muddle, in their case was replaced by the instinct to pass by as discreetly far as possible on the other side.
Life in mass was sensual only, to be lived and loved in its extremity. There could be no rest-houses for revolt, no dividend of joy paid out. Its spirit was accretive, to endure as far as the senses would endure, and to use each such advance as base for further adventure, deeper privation, sharper pain. Sense could not reach back or forward. A felt emotion was a conquered emotion, an experience gone dead, which we buried by expressing it.
In his life he had air and winds, sun and light, open spaces and a great emptiness.