Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
T. E. LawrenceRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects a fear of growing up, highlighting the contrast between the skills of maturity and the imaginative spirit of youth.
T. E. Lawrence expresses a bittersweet sentiment regarding maturity, suggesting that while growing older brings skills, knowledge, and a refined sense of artistry, it also comes with a loss of the youthful imagination and spontaneity that makes life feel complete. The tension between these two states illustrates the complexity of human experience, where the gain of maturity may sometimes overshadow the beauty found in the simplicity of boyhood.
Themes
MaturityYouthImaginationExperienceGrowth
In practice
Example use cases
This quote is perfect for a discussion on personal growth during a motivational speech.
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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