Iris Murdoch Quotes

Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.

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

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

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

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

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

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.

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

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

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

The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.

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

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.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

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.

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

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

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

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

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.

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

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

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

youth is a marvelous garment

Being in love is an exhausting business.

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

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

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

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

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.

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

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

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

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.

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

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

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

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

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

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

My heart was beating like an army on the march.