Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
T. E. LawrenceRead
We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the emotional highs and lows of human experience.
T. E. Lawrence poignantly describes the tumultuous nature of emotional experiences, where individuals often find themselves oscillating between extremes of elation and despair. This analogy of living on the 'crest' and 'trough' of emotional waves emphasizes the inherent instability in our feelings, suggesting that life is characterized by moments of intense highs and painful lows, and that these fluctuations are a natural part of the human condition.
Themes
EmotionsFeelingsPhilosophyLifeWaves
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about resilience in overcoming emotional challenges.
More from T. E. Lawrence
All quotes βAll 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. LawrenceRead
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.
T. E. LawrenceRead
The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness. Their profound reaction from matter led them to preach bareness, renunciation, poverty; and the atmosphere of this invention stifled the minds of the desert pitilessly.
T. E. LawrenceRead
Arab civilizations had been of an abstract nature, moral and intellectual rather than applied; and their lack of public spirit made their excellent private qualities futile. They were fortunate in their epoch: Europe had fallen barbarous; and the memory of Greek and Latin learning was fading from men's minds.
T. E. LawrenceRead
We lived many lives in those whirling campaigns, never sparing ourselves; yet when we achieved, and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew.
T. E. LawrenceRead
Similar quotes
I don't like purely philosophical works. I think a little philosophy should be added to life and art by way of seasoning, but to make it one's specialty seems to me as strange as eating nothing but horseradish." - Lara, from Doctor Zhivago
Boris PasternakRead
If the world is to save any part of its resources for the future, it must reduce not only consumption but the number of consumers.
B. F. SkinnerRead
In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.
R. D. LaingRead
Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade; therefore they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as be wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.
John F. KennedyRead
I don't look at myself as a commodity, but I'm sure a lot of people have.
Marilyn MonroeRead
The President to-night has a dream: - He was in a party of plain people, and, as it became known who he was, they began to comment on his appearance. One of them said: - "He is a very common-looking man". The President replied: - "The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is the reason he makes so many of them".
Abraham LincolnRead