Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime!… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
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… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
“Oh if only I could take my mother away and never know of these things again. But it was impossible, the machine would go… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share
