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!
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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.
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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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