Best 688 quotes of Iris Murdoch on MyQuotes

Iris Murdoch

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    Iris Murdoch

    A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.

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    Iris Murdoch

    A death is the most terrible of facts.

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    Iris Murdoch

    All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

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    Iris Murdoch

    ... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.

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    Iris Murdoch

    A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

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    Iris Murdoch

    All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

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    Iris Murdoch

    All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.

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    Iris Murdoch

    A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

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    Iris Murdoch

    A middling talent makes for a more serene life.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Anything that consoles is fake.

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    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.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

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    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.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

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    Iris Murdoch

    being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Being in love is an exhausting business.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

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    Iris Murdoch

    Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

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    Iris Murdoch

    But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

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    Iris Murdoch

    confession ran in the family.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff ourselves and we go away depressed and disappointed and probably feeling a bit queasy into the bargain. It's an image of the déçu in human existence. A greedy start and a stupefied finish. Waiters, who are constantly observing this cycle, must be the most disillusioned of men.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Every artist is an unhappy lover.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

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    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.

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    Iris Murdoch

    evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.

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    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.

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    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.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

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    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.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

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    Iris Murdoch

    ... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

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    Iris Murdoch

    He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

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    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.

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    Iris Murdoch

    How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

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    Iris Murdoch

    Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.