Iris Murdoch quotes

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes. (Iris Murdoch)
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
Iris Murdoch
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Iris Murdoch
We can only learn to love by loving.
Iris Murdoch
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Iris Murdoch
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Iris Murdoch
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Iris Murdoch
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
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
Iris Murdoch
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous. (Iris Murdoch)
Anything that consoles is fake.
Iris Murdoch
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Iris Murdoch
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Iris Murdoch
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
Iris Murdoch
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
Iris Murdoch
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Iris Murdoch
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
Iris Murdoch
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Iris Murdoch
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
Iris Murdoch
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream. (Iris Murdoch)
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
Iris Murdoch
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
Iris Murdoch
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Iris Murdoch
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Iris Murdoch