Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life.”

— Iris Murdoch

352. “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

353. “Real worship involves waiting.”

— Iris Murdoch

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354. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

362. “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

363. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

365. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

368. “He felt sad, sad.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

370. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

373. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

377. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

381. “Every artist is an unhappy lover.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

384. “Happy love undoes the self and makes the world visible. Unhappy love is, or can be, a revelation of pure suffering.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

386. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me, you don’t know what it’s like to be all tattered and destroyed inside.”

— Iris Murdoch

387. “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

388. “How absolute the knave is!”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

392. “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

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “Anyway people never fall in love suddenly like that except in novels.”

— Iris Murdoch

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch