Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “Ludens experienced, as an extra pain, an intimation of the happiness he might have felt in such a place.”

— Iris Murdoch

303. “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

304. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

309. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

311. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

314. “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

315. “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

316. “I just hope – if he does come – it won’t be some sort of horror show.”

— Iris Murdoch

317. “Living with someone who hates you is – it drives you mad –.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

320. “Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.”

— Iris Murdoch

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

327. “And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.”

— Iris Murdoch

328. “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

329. “Real worship involves waiting.”

— Iris Murdoch

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330. “Only stories and magic really endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

331. “I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

334. “He did not touch her but enjoyed the particular intimate pain of the tension between them.”

— Iris Murdoch

335. “She tells so many different stories and they are all false.”

— Iris Murdoch

336. “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

337. “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

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “Your infatuation will end in tears.”

— Iris Murdoch

342. “She was a part, an evidence, of some pure uncracked unfissured confidence in the good which was never there for me again.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

344. “One knows what being in love is like and it is a very terrible thing.”

— Iris Murdoch

345. “You get so worked up and flowery! You sound as if you were quoting something all the time!”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

347. “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

348. “But I can’t do anything for him and he can’t do anything for me. We must wail in our own corners.”

— Iris Murdoch

349. “To find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch