Best Iris Murdoch Quotes

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

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

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.

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

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

A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the fa?ade of his appearance.

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

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

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

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

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

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

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

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

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

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

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.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

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

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

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

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

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 ever murderous obsession.

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

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

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

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.