Iris Murdoch Quotes

126 quotes in 1553 categories

• The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.
• I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.
• The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in…
• Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.
• The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
• It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
• All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
• The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
• Real worship involves waiting.
• There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the…
• It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a…
• ... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of…
• The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
• Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
• It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
• There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
• ... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a…
• Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
• People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
• The very madness of the scheme protects it.

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