Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
T. E. LawrenceRead
We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects the struggle and futility of trying to instill a sense of nationality in a barren and unyielding environment.
T. E. Lawrence's quote captures the challenges faced when attempting to cultivate a sense of national identity in a land that resists growth and change. The metaphor of laboring to plough waste lands suggests the difficulty of transforming barren spaces, while the imagery of desert grass symbolizes the fleeting and fragile nature of hope and belief in such a setting. Ultimately, it conveys a sense of frustration and despair when faced with the unyielding reality of the environment and the limitations of human effort.
Themes
NationalityFutilityHopeDespairStruggleIdentity
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about resilience in challenging conditions, this quote exemplifies the struggle to create change.
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!
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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
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