Iris Murdoch Quotes

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

If I spoke now there was always the danger of my telling the truth; when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?

I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good comes of this.

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.

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others.

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...

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.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.