Iris Murdoch Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Iris Murdoch on Wise Famous Quotes.
For most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
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.
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
He dreamt ... he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was.
But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.
He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.
A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave 'anyhow' and then expect to resume life where we left off.
Until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.
Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.
Religion is having an intense attitude and no time off... religion is about those awful deep things.
Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable.
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world.
One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.
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 ...
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.