Iris Murdoch Quotes

"We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality."

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

"We can only learn to love by loving."

"I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same."

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

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

"Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out."

"Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self."

"Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!"

"The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries."

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

"Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods."

"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."

"A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia."

"Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions."

"In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all."

"Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream."

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

"Anything that consoles is fake."

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

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

"All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous."

"The cry of equality pulls everyone down."

"Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end."

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

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

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

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

"I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore."

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