Iris Murdoch Quotes

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

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

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

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

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

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.

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.

It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.

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

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

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

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.

It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

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.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

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

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.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.

Most real relationships are involuntary.

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

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

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.

Every artist is an unhappy lover.

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.

I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.

There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

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.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

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

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

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

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.