Seven Pillars of Wisdom

by T.E. Lawrence

To live, the villager or townsman must fill himself each day with the pleasures of acquisition and accumulation, and by rebound off circumstance become the grossest and most material of men.

Sometimes they were individual piles, of just three stones set up one above the other: sometimes they were common heaps, to which any disposed passer-by might add his stone—not reasonably nor with known motive, but because others did, and perhaps they knew.

Philosophically, it was idiotic, for while opinions were arguable, convictons needed shooting to be cured; and the struggle could end only when the supporters of the one immaterial principle had no more means of resistance against the supporters of the other.

freedom was taken, not given.

‘We shall set to, and many learned and some clever men together will make glasses as more powerful than ours, as ours than Galileo’s; and yet more hundreds of astronomers will distinguish and reckon yet more thousands of now unseen stars, mapping them, and giving each one its name. When we see them all, there will be no night in heaven.’

His nature was to be devoted to the nearest job without straining on his toes after longer horizons.

These united forces of the past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present.

In the place of consequence it set freedom, power to be alone, to slip the escort of our manufactured selves; a rest and forgetfulness of the chains of being.

Programming And deprogramming

Some men, there might be, uncreative; whose leisure was barren; but the activity of these would have been material only. To bring forth immaterial things, things creative, partaking of spirit, not of flesh, we must be jealous of spending time or trouble upon physical demands, since in most men the soul grew aged long before the body. Mankind had been no gainer by its drudges.

In Arabia, where superfluities lacked, the temptation of necessary food lay always on men. Each morsel which passed their lips might, if they were not watchful, become a pleasure. Luxuries might be as plain as running water or a shady tree, whose rareness and misuse often turned them into lusts.

I had had one craving all my life—for the power of self-expression in some imaginative form—but had been too diffuse ever to acquire a technique.

That is me exactly!

and no pride and few pleasures in the world were so joyful, so rich as this choosing voluntarily another’s evil to perfect the self.