Top 100 Iris Murdoch Quotes
#1. If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power . . . - Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Christopher Buckley
#2. My favourite book - 'The Good Soldier' by Ford Madox Ford, which I have read about 20 times - is different from my favourite author, who is Iris Murdoch. I find her books exciting and unputdownable. Her characters are so carefully studied and in-depth; I love that.
Ruth Rendell
#3. I played Iris Murdoch, who had not long died, and I felt the responsibility very heavy on my shoulders.
Judi Dench
#4. IRIS MURDOCH ONLY WROTE one novel in her lifetime. But she wrote it twenty-six times. Anthony Burgess never wrote the same book twice. And he wrote about a thousand.
Thomas C. Foster
#5. Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good.
A. N. Wilson
#6. Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.
Craig Brown
#7. 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
#8. You have the older generation like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson who are not as old as Graham Greene, but still are coming on. I dare say anyone who knew the scene better than I know it could fill it in with a very satisfactory supply of novels.
William Golding
#9. they would soon be old enough to read The Railway Children by Edith Nesbit and Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome, and eventually Iris Murdoch and Alan Bennett. They could all be readers, and maybe even uncommon ones.
Will Schwalbe
#10. 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
#11. I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
Iris Murdoch
#12. Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Iris Murdoch
#13. But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Iris Murdoch
#14. The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.
Iris Murdoch
#15. Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
Iris Murdoch
#16. Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
Iris Murdoch
#17. Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.
Iris Murdoch
#18. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.
Iris Murdoch
#19. Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.
Iris Murdoch
#20. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
#21. 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
#22. Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.
Iris Murdoch
#23. (I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')
Iris Murdoch
#24. Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning ...
Iris Murdoch
#25. It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.
Iris Murdoch
#26. Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn't disapprove of people. It cuts you off.
Iris Murdoch
#27. Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.
Iris Murdoch
#28. The whole extraordinary business was over. And I was back where I belonged, where my childhood had condemned me to be, alone, out in the cold without a coat.
Iris Murdoch
#29. There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Iris Murdoch
#30. Evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
Iris Murdoch
#31. He dreamt ... he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was.
Iris Murdoch
#32. 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
#33. God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.
Iris Murdoch
#34. What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
Iris Murdoch
#35. Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
Iris Murdoch
#36. Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Iris Murdoch
#37. time. Some of my friends think that Finn is cracked, but
Iris Murdoch
#39. Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.
Iris Murdoch
#40. A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
Iris Murdoch
#41. Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
Iris Murdoch
#42. Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Iris Murdoch
#43. 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
#44. It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me.
Iris Murdoch
#46. 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
#47. Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
Iris Murdoch
#48. 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
#49. Any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.
Iris Murdoch
#50. The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
Iris Murdoch
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.
Iris Murdoch
#54. They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
Iris Murdoch
#55. No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Iris Murdoch
#56. To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
Iris Murdoch
#57. In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
Iris Murdoch
#58. 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
#59. For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
Iris Murdoch
#60. Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.
Iris Murdoch
#61. 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
#62. Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.
Iris Murdoch
#63. Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
Iris Murdoch
#64. Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.
Iris Murdoch
#65. The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
Iris Murdoch
#66. There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.
Iris Murdoch
#67. Plato was suspicious of writing which seems to remove knowledge from the present moment of the individual and lodge it elsewhere, in books, which are inert and cannot defend themselves against fools.
Iris Murdoch
#68. 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
#69. I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.
Iris Murdoch
#70. 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
#71. The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.
Iris Murdoch
#72. 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
#73. I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
Iris Murdoch
#74. Until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.
Iris Murdoch
#75. How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.
Iris Murdoch
#76. What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
Iris Murdoch
#77. All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
Iris Murdoch
#78. Where does one person end and another person begin?
Iris Murdoch
#79. We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
Iris Murdoch
#80. Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.
Iris Murdoch
#81. 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
#82. There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.
Iris Murdoch
#83. I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
Iris Murdoch
#84. One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
Iris Murdoch
#85. One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.
Iris Murdoch
#86. Waiting in fear is surely one of the most awful of human tribulations.
Iris Murdoch
#87. There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
#88. You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
Iris Murdoch
#89. The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.
Iris Murdoch
#90. We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
Iris Murdoch
#91. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch
#92. Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
Iris Murdoch
#93. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
Iris Murdoch
#94. 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
#95. I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
Iris Murdoch
#97. Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
Iris Murdoch
#98. Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
Iris Murdoch
#99. Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.
Iris Murdoch
#100. The sun shone calm and bright on the grass, refreshed by the rain, on the border of pretty stones, on the sparkling yellow rocks. It was a caricature of a happy scene.
Iris Murdoch
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