Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

254. “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

255. “But jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

258. “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

259. “I believe that unfulfilled frustrated people probably spend a lot of their lives in pure fantasy-dreaming. This can I am sure be a great source of consolation though not always harmless.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

262. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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 “What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

267. “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

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

271. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

276. “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

277. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

280. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

282. “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

283. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

285. “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

286. “Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one’s interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.”

— Iris Murdoch

287. “He was attentive but impersonal, and esteemed rather than loved.”

— Iris Murdoch

288. “Sartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.”

— Iris Murdoch

289. “He simply would not have married anybody whom he loved in that rather simple mediocre sort of way.”

— Iris Murdoch

290. “Give yourself to these great works of art. They suffice for a lifetime.”

— Iris Murdoch

291. “Your infatuation will end in tears.”

— Iris Murdoch

292. “A less courageous person would have felt that it was too late, they would have felt ashamed, they would think wellI don’t want this, I know I shall hate it, it’s all wrong, but I’m so involved now I’ll have to put up with it, and I know that later on I’ll keep on wishing that I’d had the nerve to say no, even at the last minute...”

— Iris Murdoch

293. “But to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.”

— Iris Murdoch

294. “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

295. “A few people paused to look at him, but Londoners were by now so accustomed to ‘weirdies’ of all kinds that his ritual aroused little interest.”

— Iris Murdoch

296. “An experience is richest not talked of.”

— Iris Murdoch

297. “Of course one never knows about other people’s loves, and I would certainly never know about James’s.”

— Iris Murdoch

298. “Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch