Iris Murdoch Quotes - Page 2

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

Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

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

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

Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.

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.

Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.

It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.

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

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

Anything that consoles is fake.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.