Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “We’re just living on our emotions and eating each other.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

257. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

261. “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

262. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

265. “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

266. “Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

274. “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

275. “I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”

— Iris Murdoch

276. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

279. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

288. “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

289. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

292. “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

293. “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

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch