Iris Murdoch Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

To be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.

Iris Murdoch
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

Iris Murdoch
Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

Iris Murdoch
The most interesting things are always happening behind one.

Iris Murdoch
To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

Iris Murdoch
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

Iris Murdoch
They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind, and each one is different.

Iris Murdoch
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

Iris Murdoch
Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

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

Iris Murdoch
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

Iris Murdoch
The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.

Iris Murdoch
The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

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

Iris Murdoch
Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

Iris Murdoch
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

Iris Murdoch
I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.

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

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

Iris Murdoch
Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.

Iris Murdoch