103+ Lawrence Durrell Quotes On Education, Marriage And Corfu

Lawrence Durrell was a British writer best known for his Alexandria Quartet series of novels. He was also a poet, playwright, and travel writer, and he wrote many books about his travels in Greece, Egypt, and other parts of the Mediterranean. Durrell's works often explored themes of love, death, and the meaning of life. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Lawrence Durrell on life, love, education.

Top 10 Lawrence Durrell Quotes

1. The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
2. A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.
3. Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.
4. Music is only love looking for words.
5. Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.
6. Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.
7. Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
8. Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.
9. Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will --whatever we may think.
10. Truth disappears with the telling of it.

Lawrence Durrell Image Quotes

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying. — Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell Short Quotes

• We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
• To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
• Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
• Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
• Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.
• I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
• I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.
• No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
• Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
• A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.

Lawrence Durrell Quotes About Life

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination. — Lawrence Durrell

Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work. — Lawrence Durrell

Life is more complicated than we think, yet far simpler than anyone dares to imagine — Lawrence Durrell

I am just a refugee from the long slow toothache of English life. It is terrible to love life so much you can hardly breathe! — Lawrence Durrell

I have done so many things in my life," she said to the mirror. "Evil things, perhaps. But never unattentively, never wastefully...was I wrong? — Lawrence Durrell

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination. — Lawrence Durrell

Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory. — Lawrence Durrell

Art like life is an open secret. — Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell Quotes About Love

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy. — Lawrence Durrell

It's unthinkable not to love --you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin. — Lawrence Durrell

Sorrow is implicit in love as gravitation is implicit in mass. — Lawrence Durrell

The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know. — Lawrence Durrell

But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket — Lawrence Durrell

There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature. — Lawrence Durrell

Odd, isn't it? He really was the right man for her in a sort of way; but then as you know, it is a law of love that the so-called 'right' person always comes to soon or too late. — Lawrence Durrell

Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough. — Lawrence Durrell

Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down. — Lawrence Durrell

There is no pain compared to that of loving a woman who makes her body accessible to one and yet who is incapable of delivering her true self -- because she does not know where to find it. — Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell Quotes About Artists

Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist. — Lawrence Durrell

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness. — Lawrence Durrell

I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation. — Lawrence Durrell

The artist's work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn. — Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell Quotes About Truth

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other. — Lawrence Durrell

A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love. — Lawrence Durrell

Truth is what most contradicts itself. — Lawrence Durrell

Truth is a woman. That is why it is enigmatic. — Lawrence Durrell

The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty. — Lawrence Durrell

Truth is a matter of direct apprehension-you can't climb a ladder of mental concepts to it. — Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell Famous Quotes And Sayings

A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying. — Lawrence Durrell

These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean. — Lawrence Durrell

The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro. — Lawrence Durrell

I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory. — Lawrence Durrell

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else. — Lawrence Durrell

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were. — Lawrence Durrell

I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced. — Lawrence Durrell

Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both. — Lawrence Durrell

No history much? Perhaps. Only this ominous Dark beauty flowering under veils, Trapped in the spectrum of a dying style: A village like an instinct left to rust, Composed around the echo of a pistol-shot. — Lawrence Durrell

Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach. — Lawrence Durrell

Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land. — Lawrence Durrell

The cocktail party - as the name itself indicates - was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies. — Lawrence Durrell

She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly. — Lawrence Durrell

All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely. — Lawrence Durrell

They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures - and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well. — Lawrence Durrell

The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you. — Lawrence Durrell

Whatever the heart desires, it purchases at the cost of soul — Lawrence Durrell

What are stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing? — Lawrence Durrell

The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values. — Lawrence Durrell

The steward, according to custom, had stopped all the clocks. This, in the language of Narouz, said "Your stay with us is so brief, let us not be reminded of the flight of the hours." — Lawrence Durrell

A critic is a lug-worm in the liver of literature. — Lawrence Durrell

'We live' writes Pursewarden somewhere 'lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time — not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation oа reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed. — Lawrence Durrell

I suppose the secret of his success is in his tremendous idleness which almost approaches the supernatural. — Lawrence Durrell

An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left. — Lawrence Durrell

Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique. — Lawrence Durrell

The realisation of one's own death is the point at which one becomes adult. — Lawrence Durrell

after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh. — Lawrence Durrell

It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdy that you can get tenderness. — Lawrence Durrell

Science is the poetry of the intellect and poetry the science of the heart's affections. — Lawrence Durrell

Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds — Lawrence Durrell

Try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling, that mysterious sense of rapport, of identity with the ground. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle you'll be there. — Lawrence Durrell

Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing? — Lawrence Durrell

He thought and suffered a good deal but he lacked the resolution to dare--the first requisite of a practitioner. — Lawrence Durrell

Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me, and then show me the place where he was hanged. — Lawrence Durrell

It only takes one match to ignite a haystack, or one remark to fire a mind. — Lawrence Durrell

It is not peace we seek but meaning. — Lawrence Durrell

Comedians are the nearest to suicide. — Lawrence Durrell

Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition. — Lawrence Durrell

I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity. — Lawrence Durrell

It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively. — Lawrence Durrell

Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals. — Lawrence Durrell

The memory of man is as old as misfortune — Lawrence Durrell

Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine! — Lawrence Durrell

They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh. — Lawrence Durrell

How grudging memory is, and how bitterly she clutches the raw material of her daily work. — Lawrence Durrell

Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? — Lawrence Durrell

Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow. — Lawrence Durrell

Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself. — Lawrence Durrell

We should tackle reality in a slightly jokey way, otherwise we miss its point. — Lawrence Durrell

To be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger. — Lawrence Durrell

You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect. — Lawrence Durrell

People only see in us the contemptible skirt-fever which rules our actions but completely miss the beauty-hunger underlying it. — Lawrence Durrell

Gamblers and lovers really play to lose. — Lawrence Durrell

I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter un-answered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us? — Lawrence Durrell

The whole Mediterranean, the sculpture, the palm, the gold beads, the bearded heroes, the wine, the ideas, the ships, the moonlight, the winged gorgons, the bronze men, the philosophers - all of it seems to rise in the sour, pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water. — Lawrence Durrell

Poverty is a great cutter-off and riches a great shutter-off. — Lawrence Durrell

Life Lessons by Lawrence Durrell

1. Lawrence Durrell teaches us to be mindful of the beauty of the world around us and to appreciate the small moments in life.
2. He also encourages us to take risks and to be open to new experiences, as these can lead to personal growth and understanding.
3. Lastly, Durrell reminds us that our relationships with others are essential for a meaningful life, and that we should strive to cultivate strong connections with those we care about.