Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “All chances of happiness are gone from me. Just being with myself is hell all the time anyway.”

— Iris Murdoch

102. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

104. “Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.”

— Iris Murdoch

105. “Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.”

— Iris Murdoch

106. “The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.”

— Iris Murdoch

107. “We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.”

— Iris Murdoch

108. “Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends – and which redeems all the rest.”

— Iris Murdoch

109. “I have always attributed a great importance to eyes. How mysteriously expressive those damp orbs can be; the eyeball does not change and yet it is the window of the soul. And colour in eyes is, in its nature and inherence, quite unlike colour in any other substance. Mr Osmand had grey eyes, but his eyes were hard and speckled like Aberdeen granite, while Tommy’s were clear and empty like light smoke.”

— Iris Murdoch

110. “Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.”

— Iris Murdoch

111. “Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

— Iris Murdoch

112. “I need love, I’ve never felt more in need of it than now. I feel so terribly terribly unhappy.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

114. “Language is a machine for making falsehoods.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

116. “It’s easier to sell junk when you’re known than works of genius when you’re unknown.”

— Iris Murdoch

117. “They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.”

— Iris Murdoch

118. “You don’t understand people like me, like us, the other ones. You’re like a bird that flies in the air, a fish that swims in the sea. You move, you look about you, you want things. There are others who live on earth and move just a little and don’t look –.”

— Iris Murdoch

119. “To be a complete victim may be another source of power.”

— Iris Murdoch

120. “One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story.”

— Iris Murdoch

121. “How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.”

— Iris Murdoch

122. “One doesn’t have to get anywhere in a marriage. It’s not a public conveyance.”

— Iris Murdoch

123. “So, in a curious lurid calm which could not last and yet, it seemed, could not end, the days went by.”

— Iris Murdoch

124. “I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.”

— Iris Murdoch

125. “Most friendships are a sort of frozen and undeveloping semi-hostility.”

— Iris Murdoch

126. “There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave ‘anyhow’ and then expect to resume life where we left off.”

— Iris Murdoch

127. “Plato was suspicious of writing which seems to remove knowledge from the present moment of the individual and lodge it elsewhere, in books, which are inert and cannot defend themselves against fools.”

— Iris Murdoch

128. “The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.”

— Iris Murdoch

129. “She could not bear the tenderness which a dog would evoke, she did not want the pain of another love. She knew how very much, how desperately, she would love her dog; and dogs are vulnerable and short-lived and die.”

— Iris Murdoch

130. “He looked so sad. I never saw him look sad before, he was always so superior, everywhere the king. You once called him a god from elsewhere who had lost his way.”

— Iris Murdoch

131. “We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.”

— Iris Murdoch

132. “Those who occasion loss of dignity are hard to forgive.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

134. “People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don’t admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It’s the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.”

— Iris Murdoch

135. “Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision.”

— Iris Murdoch

136. “There is a time limit to how long a spirited young person can be kept in cold storage.”

— Iris Murdoch

137. “I am sorry that our friendship, or whatever name one may give to the obsessive relationship which has bound us together for so many years, should end in this way. This is not the place to utter its elegy.”

— Iris Murdoch

138. “It is unfortunately for us both also the truth that I love you and only you utterly and permanently and to distraction.”

— Iris Murdoch

139. “Good-bye to the past, with its mysteries which would never be fully unfolded.”

— Iris Murdoch

140. “For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.”

— Iris Murdoch

141. “Brooding about the past is so often fantasy of how one might have won and resentment that one didn’t. It is that resentment which one so often mistakes for repentance.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

143. “Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.”

— Iris Murdoch

144. “What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between moments of choice.”

— Iris Murdoch

145. “People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.”

— Iris Murdoch

146. “I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important.”

— Iris Murdoch

147. “There were good times or goodish times, only the bad times were so – crucial.”

— Iris Murdoch

148. “The exercise of power is a dangerous delight.”

— Iris Murdoch

149. “Being in love is an exhausting business.”

— Iris Murdoch

150. “I am not a very nice character. You must get to know me some time.”

— Iris Murdoch