Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

355. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

359. “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

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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

369. “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

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

374. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

377. “How absolute the knave is!”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

380. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

388. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

391. “There was a shadowy light, not exactly twilight, but an uncertain vivid yet hazy illumination, wherein people walked like spirits, bathed in light and not revealed.”

— Iris Murdoch

392. “That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom.”

— Iris Murdoch

393. “But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last.”

— Iris Murdoch

394. “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

395. “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

396. “Better keep such things decently buried.”

— Iris Murdoch

397. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

399. “But thinking about wickedness usually just comforts.”

— Iris Murdoch

400. “Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.”

— Iris Murdoch