Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.”

— Iris Murdoch

52. “Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth – well, it’s like brown – it’s not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.”

— Iris Murdoch

53. “I took him for a kind of buffoon. Now I see he is a devil.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

57. “We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.”

— Iris Murdoch

58. “Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.”

— Iris Murdoch

59. “We shall meet, but as strangers. It is the end of an era. A whole part of my life is torn away.”

— Iris Murdoch

60. “Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

62. “Your coldness has ruined my life. All right, you didn’t mean it, all right I was a schoolgirl, but you could have been kinder to someone who said they loved you, you could have been gentle and grateful.”

— Iris Murdoch

63. “Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.”

— Iris Murdoch

64. “I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.”

— Iris Murdoch

65. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

66. “Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don’t expect.”

— Iris Murdoch

67. “But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.”

— Iris Murdoch

68. “We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

70. “I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.”

— Iris Murdoch

71. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

73. “There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life’s bright mysterious expectations.”

— Iris Murdoch

74. “The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

76. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

77. “Anything that consoles is fake.”

— Iris Murdoch

78. “But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.”

— Iris Murdoch

79. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

80. “Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!”

— Iris Murdoch

81. “In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.”

— Iris Murdoch

82. “One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.”

— Iris Murdoch

83. “I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.”

— Iris Murdoch

84. “Don’t tease me. Everything wounds me now except perfect kindness.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

86. “Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

88. “There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”

— Iris Murdoch

89. “The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

91. “How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.”

— Iris Murdoch

92. “You can’t go through the looking-glass without cutting yourself.”

— Iris Murdoch

93. “All our failures are ultimately failures in love.”

— Iris Murdoch

94. “I hate solitude, but I’m afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It’s already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.”

— Iris Murdoch

95. “She was a spoiler, a needler, an underminer, a diminisher, simply by instinct.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

97. “All chances of happiness are gone from me. Just being with myself is hell all the time anyway.”

— Iris Murdoch

98. “The cry of equality pulls everyone down.”

— Iris Murdoch

99. “While the light remains,′ said Carde, speaking slowly in his high deliberate voice, ’only do not forsake the joy of life. If you shall have given all your kisses, you will give too few. And as leaves fall from withered wreaths which you may see spread upon the cups and floating there, so for us, who now as lovers hope for so much, perhaps tomorrow’s day will close the doom.”

— Iris Murdoch

100. “I feel I’m living on pain, riding on it, like a sea.”

— Iris Murdoch