Iris Murdoch Quotes And Sayings

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE was a British novelist and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.

We Live In A Fantasy World, A World Of Illusion. The Great Task In Life Is To Find Reality.

Every Man Needs Two Women: A Quiet Home-maker, And A Thrilling Nymph.

The Absolute Yearning Of One Human Body For Another Particular Body And Its Indifference To Substitutes Is One Of Life's Major Mysteries.

People From A Planet Without Flowers Would Think We Must Be Mad With Joy The Whole Time To Have Such Things About Us.

In Almost Every Marriage There Is A Selfish And An Unselfish Partner. A Pattern Is Set Up And Soon Becomes Inflexible, Of One Person Always Making The Demands And One Person Always Giving Way.

Happiness Is A Matter Of One's Most Ordinary And Everyday Mode Of Consciousness Being Busy And Lively And Unconcerned With Self.

Falling Out Of Love Is Very Enlightening. For A Short While You See The World With New Eyes.

Perhaps Misguided Moral Passion Is Better Than Confused Indifference.

All Art Is A Struggle To Be, In A Particular Sort Of Way, Virtuous.

Falling Out Of Love Is Chiefly A Matter Of Forgetting How Charming Someone Is.

In Philosophy If You Aren't Moving At A Snail's Pace You Aren't Moving At All.

Art Is The Final Cunning Of The Human Soul Which Would Rather Do Anything Than Face The Gods.

The Cry Of Equality Pulls Everyone Down.

Only Lies And Evil Come From Letting People Off.

A Bad Review Is Even Less Important Than Whether It Is Raining In Patagonia.

Perhaps When Distant People On Other Planets Pick Up Some Wavelength Of Ours All They Hear Is A Continuous Scream.

No Love Is Entirely Without Worth, Even When The Frivolous Calls To The Frivolous And The Base To The Base.

There Is No Substitute For The Comfort Supplied By The Utterly Taken-for-granted Relationship.

Philosophy! Empty Thinking By Ignorant Conceited Men Who Think They Can Digest Without Eating!

I See Myself As Rhoda, Not Mary Tyler Moore.

Being Good Is Just A Matter Of Temperament In The End.

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.

Between Saying And Doing, Many A Pair Of Shoes Is Worn Out.

We Shall Be Better Prepared For The Future If We See How Terrible, How Doomed The Present Is.

Moralistic Is Not Moral. And As For Truth - Well, It's Like Brown - It's Not In The Spectrum. Truth Is So Generic.

Human Affairs Are Not Serious, But They Have To Be Taken Seriously.

I Daresay Anything Can Be Made Holy By Being Sincerely Worshipped.

He Was A Sociologist; He Had Got Into An Intellectual Muddle Early On In Life And Never Managed To Get Out.

One Doesn't Have To Get Anywhere In A Marriage. It's Not A Public Conveyance.

Literature Could Be Said To Be A Sort Of Disciplined Technique For Arousing Certain Emotions.

Love Is The Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real.

We Can Only Learn To Love By Loving.

Writing Is Like Getting Married. One Should Never Commit Oneself Until One Is Amazed At One's Luck.

The Notion That One Will Not Survive A Particular Catastrophe Is, In General Terms, A Comfort Since It Is Equivalent To Abolishing The Catastrophe.

Anything That Consoles Is Fake.

I Think Being A Woman Is Like Being Irish. Everyone Says You're Important And Nice, But You Take Second Place All The Same.