Iris Murdoch Quotes - Page 4

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

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

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

Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.

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

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

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.

Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.

... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.

for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.

The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.

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

youth is a marvelous garment

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.