Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise.”

— Iris Murdoch

252. “Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

254. “I know people can be awful dooms for each other.”

— Iris Murdoch

255. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

260. “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

261. “What we can see determines what we choose. Good is the distant source of light, it is the unimaginable object of our desire. Our fallen nature knows only its name and its perfection. That is the idea which is vulgarized by existentialists and linguistic philosophers when they make good into a mere matter of personal choice. It cannot be defined, not because it is a function of our freedom, but because we do not know it.”

— Iris Murdoch

262. “She thought, I am becoming a recluse. Yes, that’s it, that is the way.”

— Iris Murdoch

263. “He is crammed full of rage and hate and desire for revenge.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

265. “Any society contains propaganda, but it is important to distinguish this from art and to preserve the purity and independence of the practice of art. A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.”

— Iris Murdoch

266. “Or was some act of revenge still pending, some thunderbolt long cherished and prepared?”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

268. “We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.”

— Iris Murdoch

269. “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

270. “What is more tormenting than a meeting after a long time, when all the words fall to the ground like dead things, and the spirit that should animate them floats disembodied in the air? We both felt its presence.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

272. “To overthrow a tyrant, whether in public or in private, one must learn to hate.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

274. “She has somehow missed the bus of life.”

— Iris Murdoch

275. “The presence of the loved one is perhaps always accompanied by anxiety. Mortals must tremble, where angels might enjoy. But this one grain of darkness cannot be accounted a blemish. It graces the present moment with a kind of violence which makes an ecstasy of time.”

— Iris Murdoch

276. “You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.”

— Iris Murdoch

277. “I must admit that I am in a state of utter wretchedness and have been for a long time. I didn’t know that such extreme unhappiness could continue for so long.”

— Iris Murdoch

278. “She tasted for the first time honey-sweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious.”

— Iris Murdoch

279. “No good would come of all these fine intentions.”

— Iris Murdoch

280. “I’m not young. I’ve never had any youth.”

— Iris Murdoch

281. “Oh what an ill fate it was that has made me love that man.”

— Iris Murdoch

282. “How sad for those who cannot enjoy what are after all prime pleasures of daily life, and perhaps for some the only ones, eating and drinking.”

— Iris Murdoch

283. “Eccentrics with unseeing eyes glided through, savouring amid so much society their own particular loneliness and private sins and sorrows.”

— Iris Murdoch

284. “Maybe there are times when one should welcome defeat, tell it to come right in and sit down.”

— Iris Murdoch

285. “I’m not like other people, my life just doesn’t work, it never has.”

— Iris Murdoch

286. “He felt as if something had been completed and he would never see any of those people again.”

— Iris Murdoch

287. “She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.”

— Iris Murdoch

288. “What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?”

— Iris Murdoch

289. “You don’t know what it is to want a man, any man. I wish I could discover some respectable male prostitutes, like civil servants or university dons who do it in their spare time for a bit of pocket money, there must be such people.”

— Iris Murdoch

290. “Those who cry out the truth to an indifferent world too often weary, fall silent or come to doubt their own wit.”

— Iris Murdoch

291. “You’re as wonderful as I expected, and I worship you for it.”

— Iris Murdoch

292. “He was glad she had come; she was for him, as he for her, ‘another place’.”

— Iris Murdoch

293. “This is an age of demons and amoral angels and all sorts of deep fears, like the first centuries of the Christian era, it’s an age of extreme solutions.”

— Iris Murdoch

294. “Everything in his life now seemed to signal: too late.”

— Iris Murdoch

295. “The whole extraordinary business was over. And I was back where I belonged, where my childhood had condemned me to be, alone, out in the cold without a coat.”

— Iris Murdoch

296. “As it is I crawl on everyday towards the tomb. When I wake in the morning I think first of death, do you?”

— Iris Murdoch

297. “Happiness. What’s that? I don’t know. How can one be happy when one loves a demon?”

— Iris Murdoch

298. “I don’t like you, I love you. You’re a portent for me, a sign. I’ve always lived by signs.”

— Iris Murdoch

299. “Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time.”

— Iris Murdoch

300. “She was not just a wild creature, she was a wounded creature.”

— Iris Murdoch