Iris Murdoch Quotes

to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.

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.

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

I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

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

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

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.

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

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.

Real worship involves waiting.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

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

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

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.

To be a complete victim may be another source of power.

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

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.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.

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

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

youth is a marvelous garment

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

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

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

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.

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

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

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.

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

A death is the most terrible of facts.

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

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

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

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

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

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.

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

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

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.

confession ran in the family.