Top 193 Quotes & Sayings by Iris Murdoch - Page 3

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

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.

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

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

We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

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

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.

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

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.

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

I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Being in love is an exhausting business.

we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

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

We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.

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

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

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.

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.

Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

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

A death is the most terrible of facts.

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.

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

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.

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

Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.

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.

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.

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

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

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.

Every artist is an unhappy lover.

being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.

There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

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.

What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?

... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.

It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

My heart was beating like an army on the march.

To be a complete victim may be another source of power.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

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

... 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.

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

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

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!

The most interesting things are always happening behind one.

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.