Iris Murdoch: Trending quotes (page 2)

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

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

“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.”