Iris Murdoch Quotes

It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

We can only learn to love by loving.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

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 situations.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

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 individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.

Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Most real relationships are involuntary.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.

Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.

Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.

Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.