Iris Murdoch Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
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We can only learn to love by loving.
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Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
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All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.
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Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
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Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
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Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
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Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
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The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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To eat, teeth must meet.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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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.
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The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.
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But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
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The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
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He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
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Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
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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 even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
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The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
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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.