Iris Murdoch Quotes

155 Sourced Quotes

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Iris Murdoch
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Iris Murdoch
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Iris Murdoch
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Iris Murdoch
Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Iris Murdoch
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

Iris Murdoch
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

Iris Murdoch
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

Iris Murdoch
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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