Iris Murdoch - Art Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

View all Iris Murdoch Quotes
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Iris Murdoch
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.

Iris Murdoch
Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

Iris Murdoch
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

Iris Murdoch
Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

Iris Murdoch
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

Iris Murdoch
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Iris Murdoch
Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

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

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

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