Iris Murdoch Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

More Iris Murdoch quote about:

“We can only learn to love by loving.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Love #True Love #Famous Love
“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.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Sea #Ships #Return
“All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Struggle #Way
“Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Marriage #Women #Writing
“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Life #Reality #Tasks
“One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Life #Happiness #Secret
“People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Nature #Flower #Sunshine
“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.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Healing #Heart #Men
“Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Inspirational #Destiny #Justified
“Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Next #Wonder #Demon
“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

#Lying #People #Feelings
“It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Goodness #Difficult
“Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Shoes #Boots #Pairs
“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

#Hero #Divorce #Exercise
“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

#Essentials #Culture #Fundamentals
“One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Lying #People #Easy
“Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Book #Writing #Ideas
“Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Art #Opportunity #Order
“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

#Happiness #Reading #Thinking
“All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Dream #Artist #Sea
“No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Love #Love Is #Romance
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Relationship #Happiness #Marriage
“We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Time #Fate #Literature
“The cry of equality pulls everyone down.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Equality #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

#Happiness #Happy #Gratitude
“The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Children #Situation
“The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Good Life #Requirements #Life Is
“Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Dog #Cat #Different
“Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.”
-- Iris Murdoch

#Technique #Literature #Emotion
“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

#Wish #Awful #Breathe

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