Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I feel so depressed. I have to be merry and bright while I just want to cry.”

— Iris Murdoch

152. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

157. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

159. “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

160. “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

161. “Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— 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. “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

165. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

167. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

170. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

174. “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

175. “Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned for one’s ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.”

— Iris Murdoch

176. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

179. “The unspoken words trembled in the air.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

185. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

187. “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

188. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

190. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

193. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

195. “Most real relationships are involuntary.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

197. “Sometimes one feels suddenly doomed by fate.”

— Iris Murdoch

198. “The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.”

— Iris Murdoch

199. “And I thought, rolling my head to and fro between my hands in anguish, oh if only it could have worked somehow for us two.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch