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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
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Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
Iris Murdoch
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Like all inexperienced people, Toby tended to make all-or-nothing judgments.
Iris Murdoch
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There is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.
Iris Murdoch
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A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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No one should be a prisoner of other people's thoughts.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
Iris Murdoch
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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
Iris Murdoch
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People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
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He felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.
Iris Murdoch
Quote of the day
Nobody ever did anything very foolish except from some strong principle.
William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
Iris Murdoch
Wikipedia
Born:
July 15, 1919
Died:
February 8, 1999
(aged 79)
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