Iris Murdoch
35 quotes
Biography
"All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous."
"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."
"Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods."
"He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life."
"The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself."
"Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality."
"Only lies and evil come from letting people off."
"There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship."
"I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same."
"Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end."
"Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self."
"If we ignore the prior work of attention and notice only the emptiness of the moment of choice we are likely to identify freedom with the outward movement since there is nothing else to identify it with. But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over."
"Almost anything that consoles us is a fake."
"All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous."
"Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved."
"To eat, teeth must meet."
"The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick or a self-destroying or even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge."
"Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out."
"Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy."
"Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference."
"The cry of equality pulls everyone down."
"But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."
"I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped."