1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Quotes

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch was an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".Her other books include The Bell , A Severed Head , The Red and the Green , The Nice and the Good , The Black Prince , Henry and Cato , The Philosopher's Pupil , The Good Apprentice , The Book and the Brotherhood , The Message to the Planet , and The Green Knight . Wikipedia  

✵ 15. July 1919 – 8. February 1999  •  Other names آیریس مرداک

Works

The Bell
The Bell
Iris Murdoch
The Sea, the Sea
The Sea, the Sea
Iris Murdoch
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
The Bell
The Bell
Iris Murdoch
The Sea, the Sea
The Sea, the Sea
Iris Murdoch
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist
Iris Murdoch: 61 quotes21 likes

Famous Iris Murdoch Quotes

“We can only learn to love by loving.”

Iris Murdoch book The Bell

The Bell (1958), ch. 19; 2001, p. 219.

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

Iris Murdoch

“Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.”

Iris Murdoch book The Sovereignty of Good

The Sovereignty of Good (1970) p. 59.

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

Iris Murdoch book The Black Prince

The Black Prince (1973); 2003, p. 10.

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

Iris Murdoch book The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

Iris Murdoch Quotes about life

“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.”

Iris Murdoch book The Philosopher's Pupil

The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 76.
Context: 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.

“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

“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.”

Iris Murdoch book The Sea, the Sea

Source: The Sea, the Sea

“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?”

Iris Murdoch

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

Iris Murdoch book The Bell

The Bell (1958), ch. 9; 2001, p. 119.

“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.”

Iris Murdoch book The Bell

The Bell (1958) p. 91

Iris Murdoch Quotes about people

“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 book A Fairly Honourable Defeat

A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); 2001, p. 170.

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

Iris Murdoch book Henry and Cato

Source: Henry and Cato

“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.”

Iris Murdoch

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

Iris Murdoch book The Message to the Planet

The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 509.

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

Iris Murdoch book A Severed Head

A Severed Head (1961); 1976, p. 61.

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

Iris Murdoch Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Source: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 10, p. 138

Iris Murdoch: Trending quotes

“Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.”

Iris Murdoch

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

Iris Murdoch book The Sea, the Sea

Source: The Sea, the Sea

“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

Iris Murdoch Quotes

“Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”

Iris Murdoch

“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.”

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 book Under the Net

Source: Under the Net

“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.”

Iris Murdoch book The Nice and the Good

The Nice and the Good (1968), ch. 22.

“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

"The Sublime and the Good", in the Chicago Review, Vol. 13 Issue 3 (Autumn 1959) p. 51.
Source: Existentialists and Mystics Writings on Philosophy and Literature

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

Iris Murdoch book The Red and the Green

The Red and the Green (1965), ch. 2, p. 30.

“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”

Iris Murdoch

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

Iris Murdoch book The Bell

Source: The Bell

“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 book The Bell

Source: The Bell

“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 book The Sea, the Sea

Source: The Sea, the Sea

“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.”

Iris Murdoch book The Red and the Green

Source: The Red and the Green

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

Iris Murdoch book The Sea, the Sea

Source: The Sea, the Sea

“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.”

Iris Murdoch book Nuns and Soldiers

Source: Nuns and Soldiers

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

Iris Murdoch book The Sea, the Sea

Source: The Sea, the Sea

“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.”

Iris Murdoch book The Sea, the Sea

Source: The Sea, the Sea

“youth is a marvelous garment”

Iris Murdoch book The Bell

Source: The Bell

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

Iris Murdoch book The Philosopher's Pupil

The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 165.

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

Iris Murdoch book The Black Prince

The Black Prince (1973); 2003, p. 181.

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

Iris Murdoch book The Nice and the Good

The Nice and the Good (1968), ch. 14, p. 127.
Murdoch attributed this opinion to her character Kate Gray. It was not her own.

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

Iris Murdoch book A Severed Head

A Severed Head (1961); 1976, p. 181.

“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.”

Iris Murdoch Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Source: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 10, p. 148 (the concluding sentence of the book)

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

Iris Murdoch book The Message to the Planet

The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 532.

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

Iris Murdoch

"Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art", Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986).

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

Iris Murdoch

Not Iris Murdoch, but the actress and comedian Rosie O'Donnell. See George Mair Rosie O'Donnell: Her True Story (1997) p. 81.
Misattributed

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

Iris Murdoch book The Message to the Planet

The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 322.

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

Iris Murdoch Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Source: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 9, p. 137

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

Iris Murdoch Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Source: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 9, p. 127

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

Iris Murdoch book The Book and the Brotherhood

The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) p. 248.

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

Iris Murdoch

Quoted in The Times (6 July 1989).

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

Iris Murdoch Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Source: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 7, p. 113

“The cry of equality pulls everyone down.”

Iris Murdoch

Quoted in The Observer September 13, 1987.

“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.)”

Iris Murdoch Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

Source: Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), Ch. 8, p. 119

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

Iris Murdoch book The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) p. 37.

“To eat, teeth must meet.”

Iris Murdoch book The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), p. 66.

Similar authors

Ludwig Wittgenstein photo
Ludwig Wittgenstein228
Austrian-British philosopher None
Fernando Pessoa photo
Fernando Pessoa288
Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publi… None
Martin Heidegger photo
Martin Heidegger69
German philosopher None
A.A. Milne photo
A.A. Milne169
British author None
Ayn Rand photo
Ayn Rand322
Russian-American novelist and philosopher None
Bertrand Russell photo
Bertrand Russell562
logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and politi… None
Doris Lessing photo
Doris Lessing94
British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer … None
Stanisław Jerzy Lec photo
Stanisław Jerzy Lec28
Polish writer None
V.S. Naipaul photo
V.S. Naipaul34
Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry None
Paulo Freire photo
Paulo Freire115
educator and philosopher None