Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2024 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. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

164. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

169. “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

170. “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

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. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

175. “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

176. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

178. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

180. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

186. “Your best friends are in trouble and you say ‘of course’ and forget them instantly.”

— Iris Murdoch

187. “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

188. “I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.”

— Iris Murdoch

189. “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

190. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

192. “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

193. “The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.”

— 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. “A childhood hatred, like a childhood love, can last a lifetime.”

— Iris Murdoch

196. “Look Moy, see the chimneys, they’ve lit all the fires, they must have known we were going to try to drown ourselves. And Anax is running on ahead to bring the news.”

— Iris Murdoch

197. “You imagine that to live in a state of extremity is necessarily to discover the truth about yourself. What you discover then is violence and emptiness. And of this you make a virtue.”

— Iris Murdoch

198. “I’m sorry I was awful. I’m so full of terrors.”

— Iris Murdoch

199. “Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch