"Seven Pillars of Wisdom"

[fiefoe]

The Arabian character:

• Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith.
• ... Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do.
• whose heart was an archipelago of watered and populous oases called Kasim and Aridh. In this group of oases lay the true
  centre of Arabia,
• Since the migration problem was the greatest and most complex force in Arabia, and general to it...
• The camel markets in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt determined the population which the deserts could support, and regulated strictly their standard of living.
• This was the circulation which kept vigour in the Semitic body.
• The mark of nomadism, that most deep and biting social discipline, was on each of them in his degree.
• They were a people of primary colours, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of thorns.
• Their imaginations were vivid, but not creative. {I wrote that exact sentence about myself.}
• The least morbid of peoples, they had accepted the gift of life unquestioningly, as axiomatic. To them it was a thing inevitable,
  entailed on man, a usufruct, beyond control. Suicide was a thing impossible, and death no grief.
• It pointed to the generation of all these creeds. They were assertions, not arguments; so they required a prophet to set them forth.
• The common base of all the Semitic creeds, winners or losers, was the ever present idea of world-worthlessness.
• We got all the Semitic creeds with (in character and essence) a stress on the emptiness of the world and the fullness of God;
• His desert was made a spiritual ice-house, in which was preserved intact but unimproved for all ages a vision of the unity of God.
• They were a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing.

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