Iris Murdoch > Quotes

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”
― Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics Writings on Philosophy and Literature

“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

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

“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

“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

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”
― Iris Murdoch

“We can only learn to love by loving.

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― 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

“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.
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― Iris Murdoch

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”
― Iris Murdoch

“One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.”
― Iris Murdoch, Henry and Cato

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

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“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

“Anything that consoles is fake.”
― Iris Murdoch

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch

“Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Bell

“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

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

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch, Under the Net

“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.”
― Iris Murdoch