Iris Murdoch - Love Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
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
True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

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

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

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
Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends — and which redeems all the rest.

Iris Murdoch