Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down.”

— Iris Murdoch

152. “The best thing about being God would be making the heads.”

— Iris Murdoch

153. “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

154. “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

155. “Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.”

— Iris Murdoch

156. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

158. “Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.”

— Iris Murdoch

159. “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

160. “I feel so depressed. I have to be merry and bright while I just want to cry.”

— Iris Murdoch

161. “Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.”

— Iris Murdoch

162. “Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.”

— Iris Murdoch

Featured in: Romance Quotes

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

— Iris Murdoch

164. “The best you can hope for is a little peace and not too much remorse. Thoughts at peace under an English heaven.”

— Iris Murdoch

165. “A love without reservation ought to be a life force compelling the world into order and beauty. But that love can be so strong and yet so entirely powerless is what breaks the heart.”

— Iris Murdoch

166. “It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story.”

— Iris Murdoch

167. “Nothing will bring me peace except revenge.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

169. “He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

171. “As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.”

— Iris Murdoch

172. “Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.”

— Iris Murdoch

173. “But whatever she was I loved her and was committed to her and had always been, here and out beyond the stars, those stars behind stars behind stars which I had seen that night when I lay on the rocks and the golden sky slowly turned the universe inside out.”

— Iris Murdoch

174. “The virtues have secret names: they are, so difficult of access, secret things. Everything that is worthy is secret.”

— Iris Murdoch

175. “Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.”

— Iris Murdoch

Featured in: Real Quotes

176. “But there are times of suffering which remain in our lives like black absolutes and are not blotted out. Fortunate are those for whom these black stars shed some sort of light.”

— Iris Murdoch

177. “She felt intense disappointment, even a kind of guilt, as if she had missed something, perhaps forever. He had been there, she could have spoken to him. Could she call out now, cry his name? It was impossible.”

— Iris Murdoch

178. “The very madness of the scheme protects it.”

— Iris Murdoch

179. “I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams.”

— Iris Murdoch

180. “Our planet is a freak which we shall destroy by our own wicked senseless activities in the next century. Our history will very soon come to an end. Now that God is dead, we are at last presented with the truth, yes, the truth remains, but it is on a short lead. Anyway, we are nothing and it matters not what we do.”

— Iris Murdoch

181. “Anywhere is dangerous if you carry danger with you.”

— Iris Murdoch

182. “How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain.”

— Iris Murdoch

183. “It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.”

— Iris Murdoch

184. “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.”

— Iris Murdoch

185. “Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one’s life went wrong?”

— Iris Murdoch

186. “To say we were ‘in love’, that vague weakened phrase, cannot express it. We loved each other, we lived in each other, through each other, by each other. We were each other. Why was it such pure unadulterated pain?”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

Featured in: Romance Quotes

188. “Sometimes one has got to become monstrous in order to survive.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

190. “I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.”

— Iris Murdoch

191. “Love is no respecter of ages, everyone knows that.”

— Iris Murdoch

192. “Most real relationships are involuntary.”

— Iris Murdoch

Featured in: Real Quotes

193. “I’m the absolute queen bee of unrequited love.”

— Iris Murdoch

194. “There are things which are appalling to young people because young people think life should be happy and free. But life is never really happy and free in any beautiful sense. Happiness is a weak and paltry thing and perhaps”freedom” has no meaning. There are great patterns in which we are involved, and destinies which belong to us and which we love even in the moment when they destroy us.”

— Iris Murdoch

195. “The sun shone calm and bright on the grass, refreshed by the rain, on the border of pretty stones, on the sparkling yellow rocks. It was a caricature of a happy scene.”

— Iris Murdoch

196. “How mysterious night and day are, this endless procession off dark and light... I think such sad thoughts – of people in trouble and afraid, all lonely people all prisoners.”

— Iris Murdoch

197. “Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.”

— Iris Murdoch

198. “He also wanted to destroy something, everything, perhaps himself.”

— Iris Murdoch

199. “He had lived a chaste life really. It was his accusers and not his crimes which troubled him.”

— Iris Murdoch

200. “Even if readers claim that they ‘take it all with a grain of salt’, they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be ‘true in a way’.”

— Iris Murdoch