Iris Murdoch Quotes - Page 6

Quotes about:

• Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

  Iris Murdoch

  Taken, Literature, Serious

  Iris Murdoch (1977). “Henry and Cato”, Viking Pr

  9 Copy quote

• Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

  Iris Murdoch

  Love, Life, Fall

  Iris Murdoch (1976). “A Severed Head”, p.132, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• 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 ever murderous obsession.

  Iris Murdoch

  Life, Hurt, Pride

  13 Copy quote

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Intellectual, Literature, Sociologists

  55 Copy quote

• Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.

  Iris Murdoch

  Moving, Knowing, Understanding

  Iris Murdoch (1999). “Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature”, p.284, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.

  Iris Murdoch

  Communication, Happy Marriage, Dense

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “A Fairly Honourable Defeat”, p.223, Penguin

  8 Copy quote

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Love, Fall, Memorable

  17 Copy quote

• As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

  Iris Murdoch

  Void, States, Precarious

  Iris Murdoch (2002). “Nuns and Soldiers”, p.14, Penguin

  6 Copy quote

• Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

  Iris Murdoch

  Holiday, World, Frailty

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Bell”, p.77, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

  Iris Murdoch

  Worship, Holy, Made

  Iris Murdoch (1990). “The Message to the Planet”, New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Penguin Books

  11 Copy quote

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Relationship, Happiness, Marriage

  Iris Murdoch (1976). “A Severed Head”, p.148, Penguin

  16 Copy quote

• The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

  Iris Murdoch

  Sweet, Humility, Past

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Bell”, p.92, Penguin

  5 Copy quote

• The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

  Iris Murdoch

  Loneliness, Games, Soul

  Iris Murdoch (2003). “The Black Prince”, p.89, Penguin

  9 Copy quote

• Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

  Iris Murdoch

  Hurt, Revenge, Vanity

  Iris Murdoch (2008). “The Philosopher's Pupil”, p.81, Random House

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• emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.

  Iris Murdoch

  Personality, World, Emotion

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Sea, The Sea”, p.49, Penguin

  4 Copy quote

• The most interesting things are always happening behind one.

  Iris Murdoch

  Interesting, Behinds, Happenings

  Iris Murdoch (1956). “The flight from the enchanter”, Viking Pr

  5 Copy quote

• There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.

  Iris Murdoch

  Summer, God, Mother

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Iris Murdoch

  Hate, Self, Soul

  "Under the Net".

  25 Copy quote

• Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Opportunity, Order

  12 Copy quote

• Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

  Iris Murdoch

  Sadness, Piercings, Unhappiness

  Iris Murdoch (2008). “A Word Child”, p.3, Random House

  9 Copy quote

• Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Art Is, Concealment

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• Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

  Iris Murdoch

  Should, Interest, Be You

  Iris Murdoch (1961). “Under the Net: A Novel”

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• The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

  Iris Murdoch

  Inspirational, Artist, Waiting

  Iris Murdoch (2003). “The Black Prince”, p.25, Penguin

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• Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

  Iris Murdoch

  Love, Grief, Saying Goodbye

  Iris Murdoch (1984). “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine”, p.31, Penguin

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• being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

  Iris Murdoch

  Character, Men, Doe

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “A Fairly Honourable Defeat”, p.22, Penguin

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