Iris Murdoch: Humanity

Iris Murdoch was British writer and philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on humanity.

Iris Murdoch: 122 quotes21 likes

“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.”

Iris Murdoch book Under the Net

Source: Under the Net

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

“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

“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

“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)

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

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