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
Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries. — 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
any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got… — 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 Image
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“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 Image
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“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 Image
