Love Quotes by Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

We can only to learn to love by loving.

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

— Iris Murdoch

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

“(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

— Iris Murdoch

“But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who…

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love…

— Iris Murdoch

“But now, when things had happened which were too appalling to think about, when his romantic love was a corpse and his…

— Iris Murdoch

“This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence.…

— Iris Murdoch

Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and…

— Iris Murdoch

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can…

— Iris Murdoch

“How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that…

— Iris Murdoch

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other…

— Iris Murdoch

Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is…

— Iris Murdoch

“The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his…

— Iris Murdoch

“Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that…

— Iris Murdoch

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom…

— Iris Murdoch

Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion…

— Iris Murdoch

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire…

— Iris Murdoch

“I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you…

— Iris Murdoch

“He went away, bent double with the pains of remorse and regret and the inward biting of a love which had now…

— Iris Murdoch

“The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project,…

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

“Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

“This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...”

— Iris Murdoch

“Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.”

— Iris Murdoch

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

— Iris Murdoch

Being in love is an exhausting business.

— Iris Murdoch

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

— Iris Murdoch