Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

253. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

255. “The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

261. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

263. “That’s how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that’s how bloody awful it is being Irish!”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

265. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

269. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

279. “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

280. “If there is any fruitless mental torment which is greater than that of jealousy it is perhaps remorse. Even the pains of loss may be less searching; and often of course these agonies combine, as now they did for me. I say remorse not repentance. I doubt if I have ever experienced repentance in a pure form; perhaps it does not exist in a pure form. Remorse contains guilt, but helpless hopeless guilt which knows of no cure for the painful bite.”

— Iris Murdoch

281. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

284. “You can’t magic yourself out of the situation, you’ve got to live it as decently and as grimly as you can.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

286. “Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.”

— Iris Murdoch

287. “Marriage isn’t a tram. It doesn’t have to get anywhere.”

— Iris Murdoch

288. “I was now, all the time, unutterably tired as if simply keeping alive was a terrible effort.”

— Iris Murdoch

289. “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

290. “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

291. “We may love our chains and our stripes too.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

295. “Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.”

— Iris Murdoch

296. “The agony was of suddenly feeling herself so separate and so secret.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

300. “He was glad that he had expressed to her, however blunderingly, what he felt. He was glad that he had held her hand.”

— Iris Murdoch