Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE was a British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. This Iris Murdoch quotes on death, education will motivate you.
Best Iris Murdoch Quotes
- “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “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.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “For most of us, for almost all of us, the truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends — and which redeems all the rest.” ~ Iris Murdoch
-
“We can only learn to love by loving.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.” ~ 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
- “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
- “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.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.” ~ Iris Murdoch
-
“Anything that consoles is fake.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “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.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “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.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “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.” ~ Iris Murdoch
-
“Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “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.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “The best thing about being God would be making the heads.” ~ Iris Murdoch
-
“It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “It’s easier to sell junk when you’re known than works of genius when you’re unknown.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.” ~ Iris Murdoch, Iris Murdoch quotes on freedom
- “We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.” ~ Iris Murdoch
-
“Most real relationships are involuntary.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “I have used the word “attention,” which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Only lies and evil come from letting people off.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.” ~ Iris Murdoch
-
“The cry of equality pulls everyone down.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “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.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “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. A 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.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “No love is entire without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.” ~ Iris Murdoch
-
“A middling talent makes for a more serene life.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.” ~ Iris Murdoch
- “All our failures are ultimately failures in love.” ~ 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
- “Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.” ~ Iris Murdoch
