Iris Murdoch: Trending quotes

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Iris Murdoch: 122 quotes21 likes

“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

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

“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.

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

“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.”

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

Iris Murdoch book The Black Prince

Source: The Black Prince

“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.”

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

“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.”

Iris Murdoch book The Black Prince

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

“We can only learn to love by loving.”

Iris Murdoch book The Bell

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

“Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.”

Iris Murdoch book The Sovereignty of Good

The Sovereignty of Good (1970) p. 59.

“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.

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

“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

“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.

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

"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.

“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?”

“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