Iris Murdoch
» Arts and Artists » “Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.”
» Bereavement » “Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.”
» Causes » “Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.”
» Churches » “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.”
» Critics and Criticism » “A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.”
» Fantasy » “But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.”
» Goodness » “Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.”
» Happiness » “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 agonizing preoccupation with self.”
» Humankind » “Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.”
» Judgment and Judges » “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
» Literature » “Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.”
» Love » “No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.”
» Love Ended » “Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”
» Lovers » “Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.”
» Marriage » “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.”
» Moralists » “Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth — well, it’s like brown — it’s not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.”
» Philosophers and Philosophy » “Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!”
» Philosophers and Philosophy » “In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.”
» Present » “We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.”
» Pride » “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.”
» Relationships » “There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
» Sociology » “He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.”
» Survival » “The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.”
» Vanity » “Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.”
» Virtue » “All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.”
» Worship » “I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”
» Writers and Writing » “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”
