Iris Murdoch Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Quotes & Sayings

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I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge. — Iris Murdoch

If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power . . . - Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea — Christopher Buckley

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating! — Iris Murdoch

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream. — Iris Murdoch

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. — Iris Murdoch

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart ... — Iris Murdoch

The most interesting things are always happening behind one. — Iris Murdoch

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder. — Iris Murdoch

Being in love is an exhausting business. — Iris Murdoch

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

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness! — Iris Murdoch

there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart — Iris Murdoch

Evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it. — Iris Murdoch

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. — Iris Murdoch

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine. — Iris Murdoch

A death is the most terrible of facts. — Iris Murdoch

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

The true rose, the miracle of nature, owed nothing to the hand of man. — Iris Murdoch

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom — Iris Murdoch

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present. — Iris Murdoch

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

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

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. — Iris Murdoch

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge. — Iris Murdoch

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved — Iris Murdoch

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore. — 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

Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest. — Iris Murdoch

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. — Iris Murdoch

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines. — Iris Murdoch

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

Being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does. — Iris Murdoch

youth is a marvelous garment — Iris Murdoch

And do stop sneezing. It annoys me so much when people sneeze. — Iris Murdoch

My heart was beating like an army on the march. — Iris Murdoch

The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. — Iris Murdoch

What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world. — Iris Murdoch

Religion is having an intense attitude and no time off... religion is about those awful deep things. — Iris Murdoch

I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous. — Iris Murdoch

The cry of equality pulls everyone down. — Iris Murdoch

Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time. — Iris Murdoch

In a world without a redeemer only clarity was the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing, and then he would decide. — Iris Murdoch

A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. — Iris Murdoch

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness. — 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

What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school? — Iris Murdoch

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story. — Iris Murdoch

The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation. — Iris Murdoch

All our failures are ultimately failures in love. — Iris Murdoch

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. — Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch did influence my early novels very much, and influence is never entirely good. — A. N. Wilson

We may love our chains and our stripes too. — Iris Murdoch

The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future. — 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

One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats. — Iris Murdoch

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [ ... ] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment. — Iris Murdoch

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries. — Iris Murdoch

Every night is an imitation of death. Without that I would have killed myself long ago.' She — Iris Murdoch

But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it. — Iris Murdoch

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move. — Iris Murdoch

But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last. — Iris Murdoch

A middling talent makes for a more serene life. — Iris Murdoch

I can see this so clearly because I have long ago given up my own hopes of being happy. — Iris Murdoch

How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters. — Iris Murdoch

The best thing about being God would be making the heads. — Iris Murdoch

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect. — Iris Murdoch

We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling. — Iris Murdoch

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. — 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

moved through a soft tide — Iris Murdoch

My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person. — Iris Murdoch

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

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself. — Iris Murdoch

Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves. — Iris Murdoch

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

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

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. — Iris Murdoch

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you. — Iris Murdoch

Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together. — Iris Murdoch

let us not waste love, it is rare enough — Iris Murdoch

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia. — Iris Murdoch

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling. — 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

I played Iris Murdoch, who had not long died, and I felt the responsibility very heavy on my shoulders. — Judi Dench

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is. — Iris Murdoch

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait. — Iris Murdoch

She tells so many different stories and they are all false. — Iris Murdoch

Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable. — Iris Murdoch

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. — Iris Murdoch

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end. — Iris Murdoch

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central. — Iris Murdoch

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived. — Iris Murdoch

I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this. — Iris Murdoch

Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere. — Iris Murdoch

I think being a woman is like being Irish ... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time. — Iris Murdoch

Sartre turns love into a 'battle between two hypnotists in a closed room'. — Iris Murdoch

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same. — Iris Murdoch

Anything that consoles is fake. — Iris Murdoch

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic. — Iris Murdoch

Waiting in fear is surely one of the most awful of human tribulations. — Iris Murdoch