Life & Wisdom Quote by Lawrence Durrell

Durrell’s line lands like a weary laugh at civilization’s expense: history, that supposedly grand archive of progress, is recast as a looped reel of bad habits. The sting is in “wrong way of living” - not “mistakes” or “errors,” which would imply fixable glitches, but a whole lifestyle, a baseline miscalibration. He’s not diagnosing a few flawed policies; he’s indicting the recurring human impulse to build systems that corrode the people inside them.

“Endless repetition” does two jobs at once. It shrugs off the comforting narrative that history is a teacher and hints that we’re the kind of students who keep skipping class. The intent isn’t to offer a tidy moral; it’s to puncture the self-flattering idea that modernity equals improvement. Durrell’s fiction often lingers on desire, decadence, and the private motives behind public dramas, and that sensibility is all over this sentence: the real engine of history isn’t heroism but appetite, fear, vanity, and the soothing myths that let us call those things destiny.

Context matters: writing in the long shadow of two world wars and the unraveling of empires, Durrell belonged to a generation that watched “civilization” commit spectacular self-harm and then explain it with speeches about necessity. The subtext is bleak but not passive. If the wrong way of living keeps repeating, it’s because it’s been normalized, ritualized, even aestheticized. Durrell’s provocation is to make that normalization feel suddenly indefensible - and, by doing so, to imply that breaking the loop is less about new ideas than about new conduct.