Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 7 of 10

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

303. “Your infatuation will end in tears.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

305. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

307. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

309. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

311. “Only the house was still desolate and the day had a livid ruined atmosphere, time had been damaged in some deep way, like on a day of bereavement or frightful national disaster.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

313. “I saw her simplicity, her ignorance, her childish unkindness, her unpretty anxious little face. She was not beautiful or brilliantly clever. How false it is to say that love is blind. I could even judge her, I could even condemn her, I could even, in some possible galactic loop of thought, make her suffer.”

— Iris Murdoch

314. “Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.”

— Iris Murdoch

315. “I’m afraid you’re all mixed up in my mind,’ I said. ‘I wonder where they are now –’ ‘Married.’ She spoke it as if it were the name of a distant country.”

— Iris Murdoch

316. “Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...”

— Iris Murdoch

317. “I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.”

— Iris Murdoch

318. “How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that moment have refrained from kneeling at her feet and howling?”

— Iris Murdoch

319. “It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

321. “His heart ached in such a familiar way, and the very familiarity of it pained him.”

— Iris Murdoch

322. “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

323. “Let me sleep at last. I’ve had misery enough in my life. You said there was nowhere to go to. There is death to go to. I’ve had misery enough in my life.”

— Iris Murdoch

324. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

326. “The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.”

— Iris Murdoch

327. “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

328. “Only stories and magic really endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

330. “I wonder if it’s harder to be good in this age?”

— Iris Murdoch

331. “Real worship involves waiting.”

— Iris Murdoch

332. “One might have all sorts of reasons for avoiding people. It’s none of our business.”

— Iris Murdoch

333. “But I’ve got a kind of misery that makes me blind and deaf. You wouldn’t understand. You live in the open with all of you spread out around you. I’m mangled in a machine. Even to say it’s my own fault doesn’t mean anything.”

— Iris Murdoch

334. “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

335. “In a world without a redeemer only clarity was the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing, and then he would decide.”

— Iris Murdoch

336. “Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together.”

— Iris Murdoch

337. “You talk of freedom – I’ve never had it! I’ve been lonely and miserable and in despair, and you want me to consent to all that all over again!”

— Iris Murdoch

338. “The room had the rather sinister tedium which some bedrooms have, a sort of weary banality which is a reminder of death. A dressing table can be a terrible thing.”

— Iris Murdoch

339. “It’s all a dream, he thought, one goes through life in a dream, it’s all too hard.”

— Iris Murdoch

340. “I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie.”

— Iris Murdoch

341. “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

342. “Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn’t disapprove of people. It cuts you off.”

— Iris Murdoch

343. “I accused Hartley of being a ‘fantasist’, or perhaps that was Titus’s word, but what a ‘fantasist’ I have been myself. I was the dreamer, I the magician. How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place.”

— Iris Murdoch

344. “Every artist is an unhappy lover.”

— Iris Murdoch

345. “I said, “Your brother is in bed with my wife.” I added, “I just took them up some wine in bed.”

— Iris Murdoch

346. “I think women, perhaps unconsciously, convey to female children a deep sense of their own discontent.”

— Iris Murdoch

347. “You’ve got such nice hair, it seems a pity to dye it blue.”

— Iris Murdoch

348. “He felt sad, sad.”

— Iris Murdoch

349. “Magic besieges the religious life and men yearn to speak the language of angels.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch