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In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Art and morality are, with certain provisos ... one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality. -- Iris Murdoch
Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn't disapprove of people. It cuts you off. -- Iris Murdoch
God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same. -- Iris Murdoch
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best. -- Iris Murdoch
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
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
It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure. -- Iris Murdoch
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together. -- Iris Murdoch
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base. -- Iris Murdoch
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
let us not waste love, it is rare enough -- Iris Murdoch
Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves. -- Iris Murdoch
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
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia. -- Iris Murdoch
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower ... -- Iris Murdoch
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
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
A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected. -- Iris Murdoch
It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion. -- Iris Murdoch
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
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
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
Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing. -- Iris Murdoch
Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream. -- Iris Murdoch
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating! -- Iris Murdoch
We may love our chains and our stripes too. -- Iris Murdoch
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
White magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards. -- Iris Murdoch
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
One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness. -- Iris Murdoch
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes. -- Iris Murdoch
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end. -- Iris Murdoch
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
You don't understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You're like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don't look
-- Iris Murdoch
I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous. -- Iris Murdoch
There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations. -- Iris Murdoch
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
This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart ... -- Iris Murdoch
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
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out. -- Iris Murdoch
Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that. -- Iris Murdoch
However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after. -- Iris Murdoch
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters. -- Iris Murdoch
Anything that consoles is fake. -- Iris Murdoch
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed. -- Iris Murdoch
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them. -- Iris Murdoch
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
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art. -- Iris Murdoch
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved. -- Iris Murdoch
Evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it. -- Iris Murdoch
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. -- Iris Murdoch
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
It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown. -- Iris Murdoch
Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair. -- Iris Murdoch
But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last. -- Iris Murdoch
But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell. -- Iris Murdoch
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
The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all. -- Iris Murdoch
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. -- Iris Murdoch
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
But to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right. -- Iris Murdoch
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
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
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped. -- Iris Murdoch
But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it. -- Iris Murdoch
What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world. -- Iris Murdoch
The true rose, the miracle of nature, owed nothing to the hand of man. -- Iris Murdoch
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
We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing? -- Iris Murdoch
Being in love is an exhausting business. -- Iris Murdoch
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
You know what. You've killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don't come for me, I'll become a demon and drag you down into the dark. -- Iris Murdoch
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge. -- Iris Murdoch
As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer's mind. -- Iris Murdoch
Sartre turns love into a 'battle between two hypnotists in a closed room'. -- Iris Murdoch
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason. -- Iris Murdoch
(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!') -- Iris Murdoch
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. -- Iris Murdoch
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
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness! -- Iris Murdoch
Waiting in fear is surely one of the most awful of human tribulations. -- Iris Murdoch
You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation. -- Iris Murdoch
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
All our failures are ultimately failures in love. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference. -- Iris Murdoch
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires. -- Iris Murdoch
there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart -- Iris Murdoch
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. -- Iris Murdoch
He dreamt ... he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was. -- Iris Murdoch
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
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
The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future. -- Iris Murdoch
Being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does. -- Iris Murdoch
Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise. -- Iris Murdoch
The notion that 'it all somehow must make sense', or 'there is a best decision here', preserves from despair: the difficulty is how to entertain this consoling notion in a way which is not false. -- Iris Murdoch
A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. -- Iris Murdoch
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all. -- Iris Murdoch
Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. -- Iris Murdoch
This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs. I ran. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own. -- Iris Murdoch
They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind. -- Iris Murdoch
We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling. -- Iris Murdoch
My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person. -- Iris Murdoch
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us. -- Iris Murdoch
There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together. -- Iris Murdoch
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. -- Iris Murdoch
Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness. -- Iris Murdoch
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. -- Iris Murdoch
Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture. It is perhaps most convincingly met with in simple people - inarticulate, unselfish mothers of large families - but these cases are also the least illuminating. -- Iris Murdoch
Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself. -- Iris Murdoch
I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge. -- Iris Murdoch
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
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
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
Real misery cuts off all paths to itself. -- Iris Murdoch
He was not notably vertebrate and could hardly look after himself, so how could he look after Crystal? -- Iris Murdoch
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore. -- Iris Murdoch
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. -- Iris Murdoch
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
There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good. -- Iris Murdoch
Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines. -- Iris Murdoch
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere. -- Iris Murdoch
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect. -- Iris Murdoch
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved -- Iris Murdoch
Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate. -- Iris Murdoch
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
I think being a woman is like being Irish ... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time. -- Iris Murdoch
The most interesting things are always happening behind one. -- Iris Murdoch
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present. -- Iris Murdoch
Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here. -- Iris Murdoch
I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better. -- Iris Murdoch
Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do. -- Iris Murdoch
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
The cry of equality pulls everyone down. -- Iris Murdoch
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
I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love. -- Iris Murdoch
How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived. -- Iris Murdoch
Religion is having an intense attitude and no time off... religion is about those awful deep things. -- Iris Murdoch
There is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are. -- Iris Murdoch
Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable. -- Iris Murdoch
Things, things, they outlive us and go to scenes that we know nothing of. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Confession ran in the family. -- Iris Murdoch
time. Some of my friends think that Finn is cracked, but -- Iris Murdoch
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
We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing. -- Iris Murdoch
There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave 'anyhow' and then expect to resume life where we left off. -- Iris Murdoch
I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move. -- Iris Murdoch
And oh, when we still used to sleep together, lying awake at night and finding one's only consolation in imagining in detail how one would go downstairs and find a hatchet and smash one's partners head in and mash it into a bloody pudding on the pillow! -- Iris Murdoch
The exercise of power is a dangerous delight. -- Iris Murdoch
Every artist is an unhappy lover. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals. -- Iris Murdoch
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
In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication. -- Iris Murdoch
To be a complete victim may be another source of power. -- Iris Murdoch
Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder. -- Iris Murdoch
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
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story. -- Iris Murdoch
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
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship. -- Iris Murdoch
I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture. -- Iris Murdoch
youth is a marvelous garment -- Iris Murdoch
moved through a soft tide -- Iris Murdoch
Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat
'
'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working. -- Iris Murdoch
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
But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer. -- Iris Murdoch
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
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
We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return. -- Iris Murdoch
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications. -- Iris Murdoch
A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. -- Iris Murdoch
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph. -- Iris Murdoch
And do stop sneezing. It annoys me so much when people sneeze. -- Iris Murdoch
Where does one person end and another person begin? -- Iris Murdoch
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. -- Iris Murdoch
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge. -- Iris Murdoch
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth. -- Iris Murdoch
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time. -- Iris Murdoch
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port. -- Iris Murdoch
It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness. -- Iris Murdoch
Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest. -- Iris Murdoch
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. -- Iris Murdoch
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
One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats. -- Iris Murdoch
Only lies and evil come from letting people off. -- Iris Murdoch
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story. -- Iris Murdoch
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. -- Iris Murdoch
We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central. -- Iris Murdoch
I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to -- Iris Murdoch
Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding. -- Iris Murdoch
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
The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young. -- Iris Murdoch
True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear. -- Iris Murdoch
My heart was beating like an army on the march. -- Iris Murdoch
Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness. -- Iris Murdoch
When caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that? -- Iris Murdoch
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
The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation. -- Iris Murdoch
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait. -- Iris Murdoch
A middling talent makes for a more serene life. -- Iris Murdoch
What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school? -- Iris Murdoch
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling. -- Iris Murdoch
Time, like the sea, unties all knots. -- Iris Murdoch
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
One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own. -- Iris Murdoch
To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate. -- Iris Murdoch
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
We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out. -- Iris Murdoch
Every night is an imitation of death. Without that I would have killed myself long ago.' She -- Iris Murdoch
The very madness of the scheme protects it. -- Iris Murdoch
A death is the most terrible of facts. -- Iris Murdoch
Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues. -- Iris Murdoch
He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment. -- Iris Murdoch
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is. -- Iris Murdoch
Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [ ... ] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment. -- Iris Murdoch
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom -- Iris Murdoch
We can only learn to love by loving. -- Iris Murdoch
Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair. -- Iris Murdoch
I can see this so clearly because I have long ago given up my own hopes of being happy. -- Iris Murdoch
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. -- Iris Murdoch
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous. -- Iris Murdoch
She tells so many different stories and they are all false. -- Iris Murdoch
The best thing about being God would be making the heads. -- Iris Murdoch
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. -- Iris Murdoch
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins. -- Iris Murdoch
An experience is richest not talked of. -- Iris Murdoch
Most real relationships are involuntary. -- Iris Murdoch