Iris Murdoch Quotes

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.

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

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

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.

... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.

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.

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

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

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.

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

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

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.

We can only learn to love by loving.

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

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.

The most interesting things are always happening behind one.

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

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.

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

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

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.

Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

A middling talent makes for a more serene life.

Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.

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.

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

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

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

My heart was beating like an army on the march.

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.

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.

... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?

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

until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.

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

Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.