Top 193 Quotes & Sayings by Iris Murdoch
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Irish novelist Iris Murdoch.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
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.
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Anything that consoles is fake.
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
We can only learn to love by loving.
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
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.
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
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.
Most real relationships are involuntary.
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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.
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.
Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
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.
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.
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.
One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.
The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
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.
Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
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