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

"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. "
— Iris Murdoch

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

"“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.” "
— Iris Murdoch

"Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins."
— Iris Murdoch

"One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats."
— Iris Murdoch

""We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.
But given the state of the world, is it wise?"
— Iris Murdoch

"We can only learn to love by loving.

"
— Iris Murdoch

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

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

"I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better war; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back."
— Iris Murdoch (The Bell)

"One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own."
— Iris Murdoch (Henry and Cato)

"Anything that consoles is fake."
— Iris Murdoch

"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."
— Iris Murdoch

"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.
"
— Iris Murdoch

"I hate solitude, but i'm afraid if 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."
— Iris Murdoch (Under the Net)

""Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is."
"
— Iris Murdoch

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

"Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea."
— Iris Murdoch

"We can only learn to love by loving.
"
— Iris Murdoch

"Then I felt too that i might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only or course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgments on people are never final, the 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."
— Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea)

"Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is."
— Iris Murdoch

"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. "
— Iris Murdoch

"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."
— Iris Murdoch (The Sea, The Sea)

"Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself."
— Iris Murdoch

"In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all. "
— Iris Murdoch

"'Every persisting marriage is bared 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...'"
— Iris Murdoch

"Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real"
— Iris Murdoch

"Writing is like getting married. One Should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck"
— Iris Murdoch

""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." "
— Iris Murdoch

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

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