Iris Murdoch Quotes

“Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.”

“Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.”

“One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.”

“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.”

“Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.”

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

“One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.”

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?”

“The chief requirement of the good life… is to live without any image of oneself.”

“He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.”

“One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.”

“People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.”

“Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.”

“Only lies and evil come from letting people off.”

“The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.”

“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.”

“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.”

“Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”

“The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.”

“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.”

“Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.”

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

“I think being a woman is like being Irish… Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.”

“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”

“Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”

“What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”

“We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.”

“I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.”

“As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.”

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

“How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.”

“youth is a marvelous garment”

“But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.”

“Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.”

“Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.”

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

“Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.”

“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”

“We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.”

“The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.”

“Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.”

“I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.”

“I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”

“The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.”

“All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.”

“Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.”

“A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.”

“The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.”

“The cry of equality pulls everyone down.”

“Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)”

“Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.”

“To eat, teeth must meet.”

“Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”