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

302. “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

303. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

305. “Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

310. “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

311. “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

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “Real worship involves waiting.”

— Iris Murdoch

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319. “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

320. “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

321. “Only stories and magic really endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

327. “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

328. “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

329. “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

330. “Your infatuation will end in tears.”

— Iris Murdoch

331. “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

332. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

340. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

342. “He felt sad, sad.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

344. “This figure, which I had so vaguely, idly, noticed before was now utterly changed in my eyes. The whole world was its background. And between me and it there hovered, perhaps for the last time, the vision of a slim long-legged girl with gleaming thighs. I ran.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

347. “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

348. “And do stop sneezing. It annoys me so much when people sneeze.”

— Iris Murdoch

349. “Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch