Iris Murdoch Quotations

We can only learn to love by loving.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

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

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

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

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

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

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

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

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.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

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

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

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

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

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

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

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

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.

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

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.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

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

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

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.

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

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats

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

We defend ourself with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing

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...

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

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.

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

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

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

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.

confession ran in the family.

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

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

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

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

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

A death is the most terrible of facts.

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

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.

... 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.

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

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.

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

Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

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

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

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

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

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

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.

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

Anything that consoles is fake.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

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

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.

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.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

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!

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.