Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “I’m not like other people, my life just doesn’t work, it never has.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

304. “What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?”

— Iris Murdoch

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

308. “Only stories and magic really endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “Your infatuation will end in tears.”

— Iris Murdoch

318. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

322. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

325. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “The agony was of suddenly feeling herself so separate and so secret.”

— Iris Murdoch

336. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “Real worship involves waiting.”

— Iris Murdoch

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342. “This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart...”

— Iris Murdoch

343. “However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

346. “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

347. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

349. “I adore your jealousy, especially when it’s so misplaced. I expect Shakespeare wrote a sonnet about that.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch