They were incorrigibly children of the idea, feckless and color-blind, for whom body and spirit were forever and inevitably opposed.
The Semitic mind was strange and dark full of depressions and exaltations, lacking in rule, but with more of ardor and more fertile in belief than any other in the world. They were people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. The were unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail.

T.E. Lawrence