Top 193 Quotes & Sayings by Iris Murdoch - Page 2

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

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

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.

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

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.

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

Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

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

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.

Real worship involves waiting.

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.

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.

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

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.

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

I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.

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

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

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

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

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

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

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

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.

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.

A middling talent makes for a more serene life.

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

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.

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.

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

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.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

youth is a marvelous garment

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

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

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

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.

To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.

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

The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!