Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

156. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

161. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

163. “Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest.”

— Iris Murdoch

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

170. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

172. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

174. “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

175. “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

176. “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

177. “Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.”

— Iris Murdoch

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

181. “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

182. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

187. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

189. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

191. “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

192. “The room, the wall, trembled with precision, as if the inanimate world were about to utter a word.”

— Iris Murdoch

193. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

196. “Some people are just ‘diminishers’ and ‘spoilers’ for others. I suppose almost everybody diminishes someone. A saint would be nobody’s spoiler.”

— Iris Murdoch

197. “I know girls aren’t supposed to tell, but I’ve got to tell – just in case you should fail to love me because you never knew how much I loved you. I want not to have to say later – I wish I’d told him.”

— Iris Murdoch

Featured in: Romance Quotes

198. “I did not like the look of him at all. Something significantly ill-omened which I could not yet define emanated from him.”

— Iris Murdoch

199. “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

200. “No! I can’t leave him, I’m bound to him, I’m made of him, I am him!”

— Iris Murdoch