Iris Murdoch Quotes

126 quotes in 1553 categories

• All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
• The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or…
• Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
• But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
• Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
• Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
• Every artist is an unhappy lover.
• Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
• Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
• Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul…
• Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
• It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is…
• Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
• Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
• Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
• Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.
• Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
• The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
• One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.
• We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

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