Iris Murdoch Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

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

Iris Murdoch
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

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

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

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
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Iris Murdoch
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Iris Murdoch
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

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 even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

Iris Murdoch
Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

Iris Murdoch
Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.

Iris Murdoch
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Iris Murdoch
Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.

Iris Murdoch
Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love.

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
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

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

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

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
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

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
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

Iris Murdoch