Iris Murdoch Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

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

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
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
Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.

Iris Murdoch
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
One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

Iris Murdoch
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
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
Since reality is incomplete, art must not be too much afraid of incompleteness.

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

Iris Murdoch
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

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

Iris Murdoch
Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

Iris Murdoch
I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

Iris Murdoch
There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.

Iris Murdoch
Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

Iris Murdoch
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.

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
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
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
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

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
There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern...

Iris Murdoch
The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

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
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.

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

Iris Murdoch
It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.

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.

Iris Murdoch