Iris Murdoch Quotes - Page 7

being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

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 defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

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

Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff ourselves and we go away depressed and disappointed and probably feeling a bit queasy into the bargain. It's an image of the déçu in human existence. A greedy start and a stupefied finish. Waiters, who are constantly observing this cycle, must be the most disillusioned of men.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

confession ran in the family.

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

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

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

A death is the most terrible of facts.

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

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

Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

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.

there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.

Every artist is an unhappy lover.