110+ Iris Murdoch Quotes On Death, Happiness And Philosophical

Iris Murdoch was an Irish author, philosopher, and academic. She wrote more than twenty five novels, as well as several plays, and philosophical works. Her novels often explore themes of morality, ethics, and relationships, and she won the Booker Prize in 1978 for her novel The Sea, The Sea. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Iris Murdoch on love, death, happiness.

Top 10 Iris Murdoch Quotes

1. A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
2. Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
3. We can only learn to love by loving.
4. He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
5. 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.
6. Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
7. 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.
8. I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
9. People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
10. Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Iris Murdoch Image Quotes

We can only learn to love by loving. — Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Short Quotes

• In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
• Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
• Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
• Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.
• The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.
• The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
• I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.
• Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
• There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
• Most real relationships are involuntary.

Iris Murdoch Quotes About Love

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. — Iris Murdoch

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

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. — Iris Murdoch

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central. — 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

All our failures are ultimately failures in love. — Iris Murdoch

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base. — Iris Murdoch

Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph. — 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

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear. — Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Quotes About Death

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art. — Iris Murdoch

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came. — Iris Murdoch

A death is the most terrible of facts. — Iris Murdoch

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing. — Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Quotes About 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. — Iris Murdoch

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger. — Iris Murdoch

In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication. — Iris Murdoch

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. — Iris Murdoch

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better. — Iris Murdoch

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived. — Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Quotes About People

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are. — Iris Murdoch

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

I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to — Iris Murdoch

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own. — Iris Murdoch

Only lies and evil come from letting people off. — Iris Murdoch

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is. — Iris Murdoch

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin? — Iris Murdoch

... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. — Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Quotes About Moral

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference. — Iris Murdoch

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic. — 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

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals. — Iris Murdoch

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central. — 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

Iris Murdoch Famous Quotes And Sayings

We can only learn to love by loving. — 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

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing? — Iris Murdoch

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

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

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth. — Iris Murdoch

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

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating! — Iris Murdoch

Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning. — Iris Murdoch

A middling talent makes for a more serene life. — Iris Murdoch

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped. — Iris Murdoch

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder. — Iris Murdoch

Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen. — Iris Murdoch

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. — Iris Murdoch

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins. — Iris Murdoch

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end. — Iris Murdoch

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously. — Iris Murdoch

Real misery cuts off all paths to itself. — Iris Murdoch

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

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling. — Iris Murdoch

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. — 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

Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us. — Iris Murdoch

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown. — Iris Murdoch

It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion. — Iris Murdoch

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding. — Iris Murdoch

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge. — Iris Murdoch

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. — Iris Murdoch

Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best. — Iris Murdoch

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is. — Iris Murdoch

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe. — Iris Murdoch

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous. — Iris Murdoch

The best thing about being God would be making the heads. — Iris Murdoch

Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing. — Iris Murdoch

There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations. — Iris Murdoch

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

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story. — Iris Murdoch

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected. — Iris Murdoch

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness! — Iris Murdoch

Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do. — Iris Murdoch

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines. — Iris Murdoch

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls. — Iris Murdoch

Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower. — 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

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine. — Iris Murdoch

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

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them. — Iris Murdoch

Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love. — Iris Murdoch

I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous. — Iris Murdoch

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself. — Iris Murdoch

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. — Iris Murdoch

Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate. — Iris Murdoch

Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere. — Iris Murdoch

A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the fa?ade of his appearance. — Iris Murdoch

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race. — Iris Murdoch

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

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness. — Iris Murdoch

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

Language is a machine for making falsehoods. — Iris Murdoch

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom — Iris Murdoch

They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind. — Iris Murdoch

To be a complete victim may be another source of power. — Iris Murdoch

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. — Iris Murdoch

The most interesting things are always happening behind one. — Iris Murdoch

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing. — Iris Murdoch

My heart was beating like an army on the march. — Iris Murdoch

Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair. — Iris Murdoch

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy. — Iris Murdoch

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. — Iris Murdoch

Life Lessons by Iris Murdoch

1. Iris Murdoch taught us to be honest with ourselves and to strive for self-knowledge, as only through understanding ourselves can we understand others.
2. She encouraged us to be compassionate and kind, and to be open to the beauty of the world around us.
3. Murdoch also taught us to be brave and to take risks, as it is only through taking risks that we can truly experience life.