Iris Murdoch famous quotes

We can only learn to love by loving.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Love #True Love #Famous Love

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

#Sea #Ships #Return

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Struggle #Way

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Marriage #Women #Writing

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Life #Reality #Tasks

One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Life #Happiness #Secret

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

#Nature #Flower #Sunshine

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

#Healing #Heart #Men

Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Inspirational #Destiny #Justified

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Next #Wonder #Demon

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Lying #People #Feelings

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Goodness #Difficult

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Shoes #Boots #Pairs

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Hero #Divorce #Exercise

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

#Essentials #Culture #Fundamentals

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Lying #People #Easy

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Book #Writing #Ideas

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Opportunity #Order

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Happiness #Reading #Thinking

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Dream #Artist #Sea

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Love #Love Is #Romance

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Relationship #Happiness #Marriage

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Time #Fate #Literature

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Equality #Cry

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Happiness #Happy #Gratitude

The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Children #Situation

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Good Life #Requirements #Life Is

Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Dog #Cat #Different

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Technique #Literature #Emotion

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!
-- Iris Murdoch

#Wish #Awful #Breathe

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Philosophy #Understanding #Kind

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Home #People #Sick

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Inspirational #Machines #Language

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Intellectual #Literature #Sociologists

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Truth #Civilisation

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
-- Iris Murdoch

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Sweet #Humility #Past

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Pain #Memories

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Light #Cozy

I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Particular

Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Effort #Soul #Desire

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
-- Iris Murdoch

#Sadness #Piercings #Unhappiness

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Love #Powerful #Reality

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern...
-- Iris Murdoch

#Summer #God #Mother

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Inspirational #Artist #Waiting

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
-- Iris Murdoch

#May #Moral #Values

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Junk #Genius #Easier

A death is the most terrible of facts.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Death #Facts #Terrible

Real worship involves waiting.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Faith #Real #Waiting

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Loneliness #Games #Soul

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Love #Darkness #Looks

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Simple #Speak

Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Love #Sex #World

The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Writing #Letters

Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Hate #Darkness #Caves

Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Children #Despair #Adults

confession ran in the family.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Confession #Ran

to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Understood #Humans #Oneself

We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Light #Self #Secret

I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Failure #Book #Years

My heart was beating like an army on the march.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Heart #Army #March

... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?
-- Iris Murdoch

#Telling The Truth #Caught

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Should #Interest

The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Interesting #Most Interesting #Behinds

Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Love Is #Gold #Our Love

Being in love is an exhausting business.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Being In Love #Love Is

Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Love Is #Names #Secret

Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Sound #Humans #Relate

... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Spiritual #People #Perfect

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Hate

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Children #Dirty #Anxiety

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Desire #Doe #Needs

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
-- Iris Murdoch

#Names #Cures #Prisoner

I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to
-- Iris Murdoch

#Philosophy #Thinking #Ideas

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Dream #Opportunity #Space

Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff ourselves and we go away depressed and disappointed and probably feeling a bit queasy into the bargain. It's an image of the déçu in human existence. A greedy start and a stupefied finish. Waiters, who are constantly observing this cycle, must be the most disillusioned of men.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Men #Race #Feelings

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Learning #Secret #Curiosity

evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Hate #Evil #Tools

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Failure

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Lying #Food #Profound

The best thing about being God would be making the heads.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Would Be

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Happiness #Insult #Innocent

Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Hate #Hatred #Vision

Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Bears #Illness #Harder

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Secret #Inward #Most Amazing

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Distance #Acting #World

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning ...
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Giving #Shapes

until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.
-- Iris Murdoch

#London #Able #Forget

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Long #Structure #Long Marriage

In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Communication #Happy Marriage #Dense

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Thinking #Sorrow

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Finals #Void #Faces

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Marriage #Selfish #Giving

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

#Country #Self #Long

I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Hate #Self #Soul

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Magic #Theatre #Wonderful

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.
-- Iris Murdoch

#Philosophy #Views #Political

Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...
-- Iris Murdoch

#Mean #Feet #Self

youth is a marvelous garment
-- Iris Murdoch

#Youth #Garments

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

#Holiday #World #Frailty