Top 100 Iris Murdoch Quotes
#1. People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.
Iris Murdoch
#2. Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
Iris Murdoch
#3. Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.
Iris Murdoch
#4. Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.
Iris Murdoch
#5. Thinking about the misery of the world is a favourite contemporary occupation. and if you can't think the television set will think for you.
Iris Murdoch
#6. Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn't disapprove of people. It cuts you off.
Iris Murdoch
#7. Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
Iris Murdoch
#8. God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.
Iris Murdoch
#9. What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
Iris Murdoch
#10. Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Iris Murdoch
#11. time. Some of my friends think that Finn is cracked, but
Iris Murdoch
#13. Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Iris Murdoch
#14. How mysterious night and day are, this endless procession off dark and light ... I think such sad thoughts - of people in trouble and afraid, all lonely people all prisoners.
Iris Murdoch
#15. The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
Iris Murdoch
#16. When I'm up to something I find it very hard to realize that I probably look no different from the way I look on other occasions.
Iris Murdoch
#17. You imagine that to live in a state of extremity is necessarily to discover the truth about yourself. What you discover then is violence and emptiness. And of this you make a virtue.
Iris Murdoch
#18. Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends
and which redeems all the rest.
Iris Murdoch
#19. No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Iris Murdoch
#20. To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
Iris Murdoch
#21. In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
Iris Murdoch
#22. Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.
Iris Murdoch
#23. You don't respect me," said Dora, her voice trembling.
"Of course I don't respect you," said Paul. "Have I any reason to? I'm in love with you, unfortunately, that's all."
"Well, it's unfortunate for me too," said Dora, starting to cry.
Iris Murdoch
#24. Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
Iris Murdoch
#25. There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.
Iris Murdoch
#26. Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
Iris Murdoch
#27. But one must do something about the past. It doesn't just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.
Iris Murdoch
#28. Yet on the other hand, I did manage to write, and without more than occasional repining, during my years of bondage, and I would not, as some unsatisfied writers do, blame my lack of productivity upon my lack of time.
Iris Murdoch
#29. How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.
Iris Murdoch
#30. Where does one person end and another person begin?
Iris Murdoch
#31. We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
Iris Murdoch
#32. The past and present are after all so close, almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.
Iris Murdoch
#33. One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
Iris Murdoch
#34. You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
Iris Murdoch
#35. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch
#36. Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
Iris Murdoch
#37. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
Iris Murdoch
#38. In a world without a redeemer only clarity was the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing, and then he would decide.
Iris Murdoch
#40. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
Iris Murdoch
#41. My heart was beating like an army on the march.
Iris Murdoch
#42. The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
Iris Murdoch
#43. What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between moments of choice.
Iris Murdoch
#44. All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
Iris Murdoch
#45. For most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
Iris Murdoch
#46. We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
Iris Murdoch
#47. To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.
Iris Murdoch
#48. One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
Iris Murdoch
#49. Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
Iris Murdoch
#50. We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.
Iris Murdoch
#51. As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
Iris Murdoch
#52. But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.
Iris Murdoch
#53. Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that.
Iris Murdoch
#56. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Iris Murdoch
#57. She tells so many different stories and they are all false.
Iris Murdoch
#58. He was not notably vertebrate and could hardly look after himself, so how could he look after Crystal?
Iris Murdoch
#59. Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [ ... ] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
Iris Murdoch
#60. The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
Iris Murdoch
#61. We naturally take in the catastrophes of our friends a pleasure which genuinely does not preclude friendship. This is partly but not entirely because we enjoy being empowered as helpers. The unexpected or inappropriate catastrophe is especially piquant.
Iris Murdoch
#62. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction.
Iris Murdoch
#63. People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
#64. Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.
Iris Murdoch
#65. Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
Iris Murdoch
#66. The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
Iris Murdoch
#67. Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
Iris Murdoch
#68. How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.
Iris Murdoch
#69. Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
Iris Murdoch
#70. Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch
#71. Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
Iris Murdoch
#72. True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.
Iris Murdoch
#73. The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.
Iris Murdoch
#74. Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
Iris Murdoch
#75. We may love our chains and our stripes too.
Iris Murdoch
#76. I may add here that one of the secrets of my happy life is that i have never made the mistake of learning to drive a car. I have never lacked people, usually women, longing to drive me withersoever I wanted. Why keep bitches and bark yourself?
Iris Murdoch
#77. Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
Iris Murdoch
#78. there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart
Iris Murdoch
#79. One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.
Iris Murdoch
#80. Things, things, they outlive us and go to scenes that we know nothing of.
Iris Murdoch
#81. We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?
Iris Murdoch
#82. Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
Iris Murdoch
#83. Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.
Iris Murdoch
#84. A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
Iris Murdoch
#85. I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.
Iris Murdoch
#87. Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
Iris Murdoch
#88. A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart.
Iris Murdoch
#89. There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
Iris Murdoch
#90. When caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?
Iris Murdoch
#92. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
Iris Murdoch
#93. The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Iris Murdoch
#94. We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.
Iris Murdoch
#95. What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them.
Iris Murdoch
#96. Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
Iris Murdoch
#97. Patchway had the enviable countryman's capacity, which is shared only by great actors, of standing by and saying nothing, and yet existing, large, present, and at ease.
Iris Murdoch
#98. That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!
Iris Murdoch
#99. Half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.
Iris Murdoch
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