Iris Murdoch Quotes

126 quotes in 1553 categories

• Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
• The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human…
• One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
• One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
• Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
• 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 of…
• Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
• Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be…
• How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the…
• I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue…
• The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall…
• We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We…
• Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful…
• youth is a marvelous garment
• Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we…
• Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
• Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
• emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world…
• we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk…
• People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege…

Browse Iris Murdoch Quotes by Category