Iris Murdoch Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

Iris Murdoch
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

Iris Murdoch
Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.

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

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

Iris Murdoch
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

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

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

Iris Murdoch
There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

Iris Murdoch
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

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.

Iris Murdoch
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Iris Murdoch
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
The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.

Iris Murdoch
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
We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

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
The best thing about being God would be making the heads.

Iris Murdoch