Top 40 Paul Murray Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Sometimes the reason we do not see the answer is that we are looking too closely at the question.”

— Paul Murray

2. “Modern life is a centrifuge; it throws people in every direction.”

— Paul Murray

3. “Never frown even when ur sad, coz u never know whose falling in love with ur smile!”

— Paul Murray

4. “Life makes fools of all of us sooner or later. But keep your sense of humor and you’ll at least be able to take your humiliations with some measure of grace. In the end, you know, its our own expectations that crush us.”

— Paul Murray

5. “Ignoring is what you are supposed to do with bullies, so they get bored and leave you alone. But the problem in school is that they don’t get bored, because whatever else there is to do is more boring still.”

— Paul Murray

6. “Capitalism needs war.”

— Paul Murray

7. “The achievement of maturity, psychologically speaking, might be said to be the realization and acceptance that we simply cannot live independently from the world, and so we must live within it, with whatever compromises that might entail.”

— Paul Murray

8. “If it’s a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them.”

— Paul Murray

9. “Too much sparkle can detract from the focal point of the painting, so I blend some areas to tone down the look of the pastels in less important areas.”

— Paul Murray

10. “Ariadne made an impression on you, and that’s great. But life is not literature. Sooner or later, the spell wears off, the romantic feelings disappear, and you’re left watching somebody’s body disintegrate. You start with a love story, you end up manacled to an hourglass, watching the sands run out.”

— Paul Murray

11. “Since when has love ever looked for reasons, or evidence? Why would love bow to the reality of things, when it creates a reality of its own, so much more vivid, wherein everything resonates to the key of the heart?”

— Paul Murray

12. “People don’t want the truth,′ he says, waving a hand at the streets around us. ‘They want better-quality lies. High definition lies on fifty-inch screens.”

— Paul Murray

13. “That’s quite all right,” I said. Sfumato, that was what the painters called it; a blurring or elision of the lines, the kind Leonardo had used to give his Mona Lisa her beguiling flux.”

— Paul Murray

14. “You always were such a worrier. It was as if you thought your worrying was all that held the world together, and if you stopped for a split second the whole thing would just fly apart.”

— Paul Murray

15. “The importance of humor is primarily to puncture fixed ideas – to make us step back and realize that our situation, whatever it may be, is, in the grand scheme of things, always contingent and arbitrary and ephemeral. And that helps us to deal with our emotions and to keep going. Holding on to one perspective, on the other hand, whether it takes the form of grief or anger or a particular political standpoint, is often destructive to us and to those around us.”

— Paul Murray

16. “This is the way they live now, like two actors in the final performances of a show no one comes to see anymore.”

— Paul Murray

17. “It’s like when you find out your lover has been unfaithful: in one horrible instant everything she was to you, the whole beautiful enchantment, falls away, and you see her as she really is – mortal, machinating, tethered like everyone else to a little patch of space and time. And the worst of it is that you knew all along.”

— Paul Murray

18. “Lack is the last great gold rush, Claude. The world is poor and getting poorer. But we can turn that to our advantage. When someone’s got nothing, does he care how much debt he gets into? When he’s walled in and someone offers him a way out, does he stop to read the small print?”

— Paul Murray

19. “I believe his lies, so he believes mine.′ She turns and looks at me straight on. ‘That’s how it goes at the end of love.”

— Paul Murray

20. “Halley believed that a kiss was the beginning of a story, the story, good or bad, short or long, of an us, and once begun, you had to follow it through to the end.”

— Paul Murray

21. “And even though it didn’t work, it did sort of work, because when we’re all together, it’s like Skippy’s there too, because each of us has his own little jigsaw piece of him he remembers, and when you fit them all together, and you make the whole picture, then it’s like he comes to life.”

— Paul Murray

22. “Prayer – Christian prayer – by its very nature is born out of an acknowledgment of need, out of an honest recognition of spiritual poverty.”

— Paul Murray

23. “I do not think my life would make a very interesting book,′ I say. ‘I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.”

— Paul Murray

24. “I don’t mind crack,” I said. “I like crack as much as the next man. But it’s not doing a thing for my nerves, and I already have a splitting headache – I say, I don’t suppose those heroin dealers carry Anadin or acetaminophen or anything like that, do they?” “I think they just have heroin, Charlie.”

— Paul Murray

25. “It used to be the smartest people didn’t always want to be the richest people.”

— Paul Murray

26. “I’m just saying that once that have an excuse, people will do anything. They do what they are told, and they take their money and they think it’s all okay because it’s just their job, while their real self is what happens after work, when they’re bouncing a baby on the knee, or writing poems about snowflakes or whatever.”

— Paul Murray

27. “So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not.”

— Paul Murray

28. “But sometimes it’s better with things you enjoy not to do them again.”

— Paul Murray

29. “It is for love. You are doing this for love.”

— Paul Murray

30. “Global apocalypse is not interested in your identity politics or who you pray to or what side of the border you live on.”

— Paul Murray

31. “There’s no escaping it,′ he’d been fond of telling us when he was well, ’the way you look defines who you are. You might argue for your soul or your heart, but everyone else in the world will judge you on your big nose or your weak chin. Six billion people could be wrong, but you’ll never get them to admit it.”

— Paul Murray

32. “Instead of yelling at you when you did something wrong, like her mother did, Dad liked to bring you on a little journey first, up over the hills and mountains. It made it hard to fight back; you just had to follow the path he had laid out, his voice calm and even, your guilt crushing down on your shoulders, until turning a corner you would find yourself at the summit, your crime lying spread out in a panorama before you, and you and he would gaze down on it together.”

— Paul Murray

33. “Maybe that’s how it will go – instead of one definitive cataclysm, a series of ‘anomalies’, each time lasting longer, with the stretches of what you call normal life becoming further and further apart, until one day it dawns on you that this is normal life now...”

— Paul Murray

34. “Maybe every era has an atrocity woven into its fabric. Maybe every society is complicit in terrible things and only afterwards gets around to pretending they didn’t know.”

— Paul Murray

35. “We are presented with a virtual world powered, literally, by the incineration of the real.”

— Paul Murray

36. “Today, in the developed world, the great threat to political order is that people will pay attention to their surroundings. Thus, even slaves have access to entertainment.”

— Paul Murray

37. “To spend time with her mother was to get a running commentary on the contents of her mind – an incessant barrage of thoughts and sub-thoughts and random observations, each in itself insignificant but cumulatively overwhelming.”

— Paul Murray

38. “Perhaps that was what made it hard to accept. He had always assumed happiness was for other people, for the plodders, the norms, the sleepwalkers, as the reward for their blinkered conformism.”

— Paul Murray

39. “This must be what it feels like to be dying, he thinks; the world remains around you, like a lover who does not want to hurt you by leaving, but in spirit it’s already gone, taking with it the meaning of everything you shared. In truth it is already transforming into a future you will never be part of; and you realize only then that it has been transforming all of this time, throughout your whole life, and you with it; and that, in fact, is life, though you never knew, and now it is over.”

— Paul Murray

40. “But in life, he discovered, parenthood was like – it was – living with a person. A new person, with strong opinions, strong tastes, arbitrary swings of emotion, all of them addressed at you. You were the passive one: the work of care was primarily to endure, to weather the endless, buffeting storms of unmediated will.”

— Paul Murray

41. “We try to make ourselves the way we think we’re expected to be. So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not.”

— Paul Murray

42. “But the class has already fizzed away, and Howard is left as he always is, wondering if anyone has been listening to a single thing he’s said; he can practically see his words crumpled up on the floor.”

— Paul Murray

43. “But progress isn’t just about stopping bad things from happening. It’s about creating the conditions for new things to happen – things that otherwise wouldn’t have happened, would never even have been imagined.”

— Paul Murray

44. “You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.”

— Paul Murray

45. “Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg – that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you’d imagined, that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing the dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of ‘life’.”

— Paul Murray

46. “Isn’t it truer to say that progress needs failure? That progress is what humans do with failure?”

— Paul Murray

47. “I suppose that’s what everybody wants, isn’t it. To be like everybody else. But nobody is like everybody else. That’s the one thing we have in common.”

— Paul Murray