Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

— Iris Murdoch

2. “One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.”

— Iris Murdoch

3. “We can only learn to love by loving.”

— Iris Murdoch

4. “Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.”

— Iris Murdoch

5. “Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.”

— Iris Murdoch

6. “Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.”

— Iris Murdoch

7. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

8. “All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.”

— Iris Murdoch

9. “Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.”

— Iris Murdoch

10. “Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.”

— Iris Murdoch

11. “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.”

— Iris Murdoch

Featured in: Book Quotes

12. “Man’s creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.”

— Iris Murdoch

13. “There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.”

— Iris Murdoch

14. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

16. “Love can’t always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.”

— Iris Murdoch

17. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

18. “We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.”

— Iris Murdoch

19. “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”

— Iris Murdoch

20. “I just enjoy translating, it’s like opening one’s mouth and hearing someone else’s voice emerge.”

— Iris Murdoch

21. “The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life’s major mysteries.”

— Iris Murdoch

22. “In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.”

— Iris Murdoch

23. “Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.”

— Iris Murdoch

24. “Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.”

— Iris Murdoch

25. “Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.”

— Iris Murdoch

26. “Waiting in fear is surely one of the most awful of human tribulations.”

— Iris Murdoch

27. “Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

29. “Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.”

— Iris Murdoch

30. “One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.”

— Iris Murdoch

31. “Time, like the sea, unties all knots.”

— Iris Murdoch

32. “A middling talent makes for a more serene life.”

— Iris Murdoch

33. “But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.”

— Iris Murdoch

34. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

36. “Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.”

— Iris Murdoch

37. “The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.”

— Iris Murdoch

38. “Freedom, we find out, is not an inconsequential chucking of one’s weight about, it is the disciplined overcoming of self. Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice, it is self-less respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

41. “A long marriage is very unifying, even if it’s not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.”

— Iris Murdoch

42. “The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.”

— Iris Murdoch

43. “Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.”

— Iris Murdoch

Featured in: Reading Quotes

44. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

46. “Only lies and evil come from letting people off.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

49. “My heart was beating like an army on the march.”

— Iris Murdoch

50. “A death is the most terrible of facts.”

— Iris Murdoch