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

302. “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

303. “You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.”

— Iris Murdoch

304. “I must admit that I am in a state of utter wretchedness and have been for a long time. I didn’t know that such extreme unhappiness could continue for so long.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

306. “No good would come of all these fine intentions.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

308. “Eccentrics with unseeing eyes glided through, savouring amid so much society their own particular loneliness and private sins and sorrows.”

— Iris Murdoch

309. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

311. “Maybe there are times when one should welcome defeat, tell it to come right in and sit down.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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 “What greater torment than to see that light, and then to see it eternally withdrawn?”

— Iris Murdoch

314. “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

315. “Only stories and magic really endure.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

321. “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

322. “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

323. “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

324. “Your infatuation will end in tears.”

— Iris Murdoch

325. “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

326. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

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

— Iris Murdoch

334. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

336. “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

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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

345. “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

346. “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

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch