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Iris Murdoch Quotes

Iris Murdoch quote from classy quote

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Ethics Iris Murdoch Philosophy

But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Love Murder Unrequited Love Women

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Angels God Goodness

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Hatred Ireland Scotland

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--''Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Bats Blindness Love Hurts Radar

We can only learn to love by loving.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Learn Love Loving

Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Existentialism Philosophy Sartre

However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Drugs Hallucinations Lsd

But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Jealousy

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

Iris Murdoch Judgement Malice Philosophy Schadenfreude Spite The Media

But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Death Life Life And Death

We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Life And Death

Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Sea

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch History Mythology

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Doing Hypocrisy Saying

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Being

I'm the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Unrequited Love

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

Iris Murdoch Life Mortality

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Difficult Days

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Love Is Real Difficult

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch People Up Planets

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Love Love Is Matter

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Down Everyone Cry

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Self Busy Matter

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Life Great World

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

Iris Murdoch Giving Selfish Partner

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

Iris Murdoch Love Change People

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Public Anywhere Get

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Soul Face Human

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Struggle Way Virtuous

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Comfort Substitute Utterly

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

~ Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Women Man Quiet
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