“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 Copy Share Image
“(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“Mercifully one forgets one's love affairs as one forgets one's dreams.” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“This talk of love means very little. Love is not a feeling. It can be tested. Love is action, it is silence.… — 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
We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing. — 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
“This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--' 'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them. — 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
“The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project,… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“He went away, bent double with the pains of remorse and regret and the inward biting of a love which had now… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“But now, when things had happened which were too appalling to think about, when his romantic love was a corpse and his… — 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
