Iris Murdoch Quotes

I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

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.

They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.

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

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

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

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.

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.

Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

Anything that consoles is fake.

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

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.

I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.

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.

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

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

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

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

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

Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.

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

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

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

Being in love is an exhausting business.

The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.

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

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.