People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn… — 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
“Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to… — 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
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
