Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

303. “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

304. “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

305. “Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.”

— Iris Murdoch

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

309. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

315. “He is crammed full of rage and hate and desire for revenge.”

— Iris Murdoch

316. “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

317. “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

318. “Only stories and magic really endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

319. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

323. “Real worship involves waiting.”

— Iris Murdoch

324. “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

325. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

331. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

335. “Your infatuation will end in tears.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

337. “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

338. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

340. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

343. “Every artist is an unhappy lover.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

345. “He felt sad, sad.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

348. “Patchway had the enviable countryman’s capacity, which is shared only by great actors, of standing by and saying nothing, and yet existing, large, present, and at ease.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch