Iris Murdoch Literature Quotations

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

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

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

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.

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

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.