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Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
Iris Murdoch
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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
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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Iris Murdoch
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All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.
Iris Murdoch
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The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.
Iris Murdoch
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Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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These three o'clock awakenings when one starts up, imagining that one has a mortal sickness; and indeed this is true. Life is that sickness, and at that cold hour one can realize it.
Iris Murdoch
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Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.
Iris Murdoch
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality. But given the state of the world, is it wise?
Iris Murdoch
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One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
Iris Murdoch
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I hate solitude, but i'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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Since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid of incompleteness.
Iris Murdoch
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Iris Murdoch
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Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
Iris Murdoch
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Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
Iris Murdoch
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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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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
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
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When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.
Iris Murdoch
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I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.
Iris Murdoch
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Quote of the day
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Carrie Chapman Catt
Iris Murdoch
Wikipedia
Born:
July 15, 1919
Died:
February 8, 1999
(aged 79)
Bio:
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish author and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious.
Known for:
The Sea, the Sea (1978)
The Bell (1958)
Under the Net (1954)
The Black Prince (1973)
The Nice and the Good (1968)
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art
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live
self
marriage
moral
hate
time
philosophy
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