Iris Murdoch Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.

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

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
When caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?

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
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them.

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
Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.

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

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 can browse indefinitely in a stationer's shop, indeed there is hardly anything in a good stationer's which I do not like and want.

Iris Murdoch
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

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 fragility.

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
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
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
As the world runs, evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it. Hatred [of evil] is our best protection.

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

Iris Murdoch
Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.

Iris Murdoch
If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships. And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy.

Iris Murdoch
The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs, and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

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

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
I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.

Iris Murdoch
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.

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
He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.

Iris Murdoch