Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."
35 Quotes
"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."
Iris Murdoch
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"Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers."
Iris Murdoch
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"Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph."
Iris Murdoch
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"There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship."
Iris Murdoch
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"All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous."
Iris Murdoch
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"Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods."
Iris Murdoch
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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."
Iris Murdoch
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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."
Iris Murdoch
"One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance."
Iris Murdoch
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"We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality."
Iris Murdoch
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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."
Iris Murdoch
"The cry of equality pulls everyone down."
Iris Murdoch
"Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is."
Iris Murdoch
"Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream."
Iris Murdoch
"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."
Iris Murdoch
"The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait."
Iris Murdoch
"Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out."
Iris Murdoch
"Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’."
Iris Murdoch
"We can only learn to love by loving."
Iris Murdoch
"If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?"
Iris Murdoch
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