Iris Murdoch Quotes - Page 3

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.

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

A middling talent makes for a more serene life.

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

Real worship involves waiting.

Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.

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

The best thing about being God would be making the heads.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

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

The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?

Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.

Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.