Iris Murdoch: Trending quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We can only learn to love by loving.”

“Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”