Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

203. “You know what. You’ve killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don’t come for me, I’ll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

205. “He said, ‘Forgive me for being a liar and a fool and an utterly worthless man.’ Louise replied, ‘I love you.’ He took her in his arms for a moment and they held each other with closed eyes.”

— Iris Murdoch

206. “Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.”

— Iris Murdoch

207. “I am just a past with no present.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

209. “Perhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.”

— Iris Murdoch

210. “Perhaps the crime was that of letting himself be loved so much more than he loved.”

— Iris Murdoch

211. “He dreamt... he was a huge white egg floating in the sea of turquoise blue, and he was everything that there was.”

— Iris Murdoch

212. “The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

214. “Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.”

— Iris Murdoch

215. “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

216. “The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.”

— Iris Murdoch

217. “Oh what a mad business, no good can come of it, only chaos, and not just chaos but evil. How did we gradually get entangled in such a terribly dangerous shambles!”

— Iris Murdoch

218. “I shall not attempt here to describe my marriage. Some impression of it will doubtless emerge. For the present story, its general nature rather than its detail is important. It was not a success. At first I saw her as a life-bringer. Then I saw her as a death-bringer. Some women are like that. There is a sort of energy which seems to reveal the world: then one day you find you are being devoured. Fellow victims will know what I mean. Possibly I am a natural bachelor.”

— Iris Murdoch

219. “His eyes closed now, and for a long time they sat quietly thus. Such was their lovemaking.”

— Iris Murdoch

220. “I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to.”

— Iris Murdoch

221. “Where’s your house?’ ‘Kempsford Gardens, by West Brompton tube station.”

— Iris Murdoch

222. “Most real relationships are involuntary.”

— Iris Murdoch

223. “There are special nightmares for the daytime sleeper: little nervous dreams tossed into some brief restless moments of unconsciousness and breaking through the surface of the mind to become confused at once with the horror of some waking vision. Such are these awakenings, like an awakening in the grave, when one opens one’s eyes, stretched out rigid with clenched hands, waiting for some misery to declare itself; but for a long time it lies to suffocation upon the chest and utters no word.”

— Iris Murdoch

224. “But, and especially with Linda’s help, he had decided that, like most other people, he was not made for reality.”

— Iris Murdoch

225. “And suffering we know breeds images, it breeds the most beautiful images of all.”

— Iris Murdoch

226. “In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.”

— Iris Murdoch

227. “I had better spend the day quietly, sleep in the afternoon perhaps, and then start again hunting for Hugo. I would have much preferred to look for Anna. But I had no idea now where to start looking. Also I wanted to lay quickly to rest the terrible suspicion that where I found Hugo now I would also find Anna. This idea didn’t bear thinking about and so I didn’t think about it.”

— Iris Murdoch

228. “Another person’s illness is often harder to bear than one’s own.”

— Iris Murdoch

229. “The trouble with people nowadays is they don’t know how to do nothing.”

— Iris Murdoch

230. “We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one’s got to stop muddling.”

— Iris Murdoch

231. “Only sometimes at night when I think that you live now and are somewhere, I shed tears.”

— Iris Murdoch

232. “The problems were too evident, they sat together eyeing them in silence. The stage now belonged to the young people, there would be happenings. Yet nothing happened; and Clement felt as if a magic spell had paralysed them all.”

— Iris Murdoch

233. “You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.”

— Iris Murdoch

234. “And now she had run into an emptiness more final than any words of rejection. He was gone and would make himself a stranger to her for ever.”

— Iris Murdoch

235. “What the cold light showed me was that my situation was simply unlivable. I wanted, with a desire greater than any desire which I had ever conceived could exist without instantly killing its owner by spontaneous combustion, something which I simply could not have.”

— Iris Murdoch

236. “Even what we are most certain of we know only in an illusory form.”

— Iris Murdoch

237. “We’re just living on our emotions and eating each other.”

— Iris Murdoch

238. “Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.”

— Iris Murdoch

239. “He felt misery, loneliness, a terrible need for love.”

— Iris Murdoch

240. “I am sorry,” said Monty. “I cannot respond to you in any way. I am just not sufficiently interested in anything you have to say.”

— Iris Murdoch

241. “As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer’s mind.”

— Iris Murdoch

242. “They really wanted to remain always in their own house and their own garden. There are such people.”

— Iris Murdoch

243. “All dreams are sinister.”

— Iris Murdoch

244. “Sometimes I feel I am crammed with demons.”

— Iris Murdoch

245. “Sometimes he would have liked to pray, but what is prayer if there is nobody there?”

— Iris Murdoch

246. “I have no close friends, that is, no friends.”

— Iris Murdoch

247. “How easily one is hurt. Or is it only I who am so stupidly vulnerable.”

— Iris Murdoch

248. “Now she did not even wish to try, for fear of rousing up something terrible.”

— Iris Murdoch

249. “Now, when she felt so deeply connected to him, they were finally estranged.”

— Iris Murdoch

250. “We naturally take in the catastrophes of our friends a pleasure which genuinely does not preclude friendship. This is partly but not entirely because we enjoy being empowered as helpers. The unexpected or inappropriate catastrophe is especially piquant.”

— Iris Murdoch