Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.”

— Iris Murdoch

352. “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

353. “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

354. “There are moments when, if one rejects the simple and obvious promptings of duty, one finds oneself in a labyrinth of complexities of some quite new kind.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

356. “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

357. “How can we not be dooms to each other?”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

359. “He felt sad, sad.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

361. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

364. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

368. “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

369. “Since she had been looking after him she had felt bound to him by a strange silent love.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

371. “Every artist is an unhappy lover.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

373. “You’re doing your thing, why can’t I do my thing? I must be me even if I suffer for it.”

— Iris Murdoch

374. “I must proceed to my next mystery and for the moment forget this one completely.”

— Iris Murdoch

375. “It’s much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it.”

— Iris Murdoch

376. “Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.”

— Iris Murdoch

377. “But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.”

— Iris Murdoch

378. “How absolute the knave is!”

— Iris Murdoch

379. “It was her birthday. She thought, I am always unhappy on this day.”

— Iris Murdoch

380. “If I see her she may kill hope.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

382. “Mercifully one forgets one’s love affairs as one forgets one’s dreams.”

— Iris Murdoch

383. “I’ve never had any luck, Brad. I don’t even hope for any any more.”

— Iris Murdoch

384. “Yet on the other hand, I did manage to write, and without more than occasional repining, during my years of bondage, and I would not, as some unsatisfied writers do, blame my lack of productivity upon my lack of time.”

— Iris Murdoch

385. “I can’t tell you – oh I can’t tell you – how awful – how sort of unlivable – everything is now – like a great black wall in front of me – Something’s got to smash.”

— Iris Murdoch

386. “I tried deep breathing, but seemed to lose contact with myself between each breath, so that the next one was always an emergency. I began to feel faint.”

— Iris Murdoch

387. “I felt so ashamed with them because everything in their life was going so well and they were so sort of successful. I couldn’t talk about what I wanted with them and they were always in a hurry.”

— Iris Murdoch

388. “The most interesting things are always happening behind one.”

— Iris Murdoch

389. “You’re such an agonizer, Bradley. You romanticize art. You’re a masochist about it, you want to suffer, you want to feel that your inability to create is continuously significant.”

— Iris Murdoch

390. “The morning brought the crisis of my life. But it was not anything that I could have conceived of in my wildest imaginings.”

— Iris Murdoch

391. “Of course we have an ‘unconscious mind’ and this is partly what my book is about. But there is no general chart of that lost continent. Certainly not a ‘scientific’ one.”

— Iris Murdoch

392. “I’m not interested. I never liked him. He’s some sort scoundrel.”

— Iris Murdoch

393. “Desperate for help, living his life now as a hideous dream, he had told nobody.”

— Iris Murdoch

394. “All the effort which he had put into making himself seemed vanity now that there were no more purposes.”

— Iris Murdoch

395. “It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.”

— Iris Murdoch

396. “He could feel the pain of her heart beating strongly against his own.”

— Iris Murdoch

397. “It might be most dramatically effective to begin the tale at the moment when Arnold Baffin rang me up and said, “Bradley, could you come round here please, I think I have just killed my wife.”

— Iris Murdoch

398. “He felt himself falling into a state, very common when he was younger, of being totally cut off from the society he was in.”

— Iris Murdoch

399. “I can see this so clearly because I have long ago given up my own hopes of being happy.”

— Iris Murdoch

400. “Girls don’t want men to be quiet and gentle, I’m told. If you’re not panting with impatient lust they think you’re not interested.”

— Iris Murdoch