Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the idea that many Semitic beliefs emphasize a rejection of materialism, promoting simplicity and renunciation of worldly things.
T. E. Lawrence highlights how the common thread among Semitic religions is a focus on the worthlessness of the material world. This emphasis often leads adherents to advocate for a lifestyle characterized by austerity and detachment from earthly possessions, suggesting that such an approach can limit intellectual and cultural exploration, particularly in challenging environments like deserts.
Themes
MaterialismRenunciationSimplicityWorthlessnessSemiteBelief
In practice
Example use cases
During a discussion on the values of different cultures, this quote can highlight the significance of renunciation in certain belief systems.
More from T. E. Lawrence
All quotes →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. 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
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
When I am angry, I pray God to swing our globe into the fiery sun and prevent the sorrows of the not-yet-born: but when I am content, I want to lie forever in the shade, till I become a shade myself.
T. E. LawrenceRead
Similar quotes
Do not confuse your vested interests with ethics. Do not identify the enemies of your privilege with the enemies of humanity.
Max LernerRead
When it comes to religion, we're not two sides of the same coin, and you don't get to put your unreason up on the same shelf with my reason. Your stuff has to go over there, on the shelf with Zeus and Thor and the Kraken, with the stuff that is not evidence-based, stuff that religious people never change their mind about, no matter what happens.
Bill MaherRead
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
C. S. LewisRead
Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.
Walter BenjaminRead
I am malicious because I am miserable
Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyRead
No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly.
Oscar WildeRead