Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”

— Iris Murdoch

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

255. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

257. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— 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. “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

271. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

274. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

277. “Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

283. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

285. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

295. “It’s so sad, all our house seems broken apart, everyone is going.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

297. “It is strange to think that when I went to the sea I imagined that I was giving up the world. But one surrenders power in one form, and grasps it in another.”

— Iris Murdoch

298. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch