Iris Murdoch quotes

Iris Murdoch was a British novelist and philosopher renowned for her complex novels exploring morality, love, and the nature of the self. Her works often combine philosophical ideas with compelling storytelling. She became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, celebrated for both her fiction and her philosophical essays. Here are 81 of her quotes:

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Iris Murdoch

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

Iris Murdoch

We can only learn to love by loving.

Iris Murdoch

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

Iris Murdoch

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

Iris Murdoch

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Iris Murdoch

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

Iris Murdoch

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

Iris Murdoch

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Iris Murdoch

Anything that consoles is fake.

Iris Murdoch

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

Iris Murdoch

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Iris Murdoch

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

Iris Murdoch

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

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Iris Murdoch

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

Iris Murdoch

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Iris Murdoch

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

Iris Murdoch

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.

Iris Murdoch

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

Iris Murdoch

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

Iris Murdoch

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

Iris Murdoch