Top 500 Iris Murdoch Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Of course one never knows about other people’s loves, and I would certainly never know about James’s.”

— Iris Murdoch

352. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

355. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

357. “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

358. “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

359. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

362. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

366. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

368. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

371. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

374. “Every artist is an unhappy lover.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

376. “My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

378. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

380. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

383. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “Yes of course I was in love with my own youth. Aunt Estelle? Not really. Who is one’s first love?”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

393. “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

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

— Iris Murdoch

395. “And she did seem then to go to sleep instantly: the quick flight into oblivion of the chronically unhappy person.”

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch

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

— Iris Murdoch