One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are… — 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
Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start… — 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
