Iris Murdoch Quotes & Sayings

However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again. — Iris Murdoch

Plato was suspicious of writing which seems to remove knowledge from the present moment of the individual and lodge it elsewhere, in books, which are inert and cannot defend themselves against fools. — Iris Murdoch

Well, we all three loved and comforted each other. We were poorish and lonely and awkward together. — Iris Murdoch

All our failures are ultimately failures in love. — Iris Murdoch

Every night is an imitation of death. Without that I would have killed myself long ago.' She — Iris Murdoch

Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest. — Iris Murdoch

Bradley, I wish I'd understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet."

"Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine but because he's so human. Even great art is jumble in the end."

"So the critics are just stupid?"

"It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can. — Iris Murdoch

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

Half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter. — Iris Murdoch

The cry of equality pulls everyone down. — Iris Murdoch

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. — Iris Murdoch

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits. — Iris Murdoch

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance. — Iris Murdoch

Evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it. — Iris Murdoch

The whole extraordinary business was over. And I was back where I belonged, where my childhood had condemned me to be, alone, out in the cold without a coat. — Iris Murdoch

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move. — Iris Murdoch

He was not notably vertebrate and could hardly look after himself, so how could he look after Crystal? — Iris Murdoch

I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous. — Iris Murdoch

Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself had watched a young fox catching mice, an elegant newly minted fox, straight from the hand of God, brilliantly ruddy, with black stockings and a white-tipped brush. The fox heard and turned. I saw its intense vivid mask, its liquid amber eyes. Then it was gone. An image of such beauty and such mysterious sense. The child wept and knew himself an artist. — Iris Murdoch

Being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does. — Iris Murdoch

I had better spend the day quietly, sleep in the afternoon perhaps, and then start again hunting for Hugo. I would have much preferred to look for Anna. But I had no idea now where to start looking. Also I wanted to lay quickly to rest the terrible suspicion that where I found Hugo now I would also find Anna. This idea didn't bear thinking about and so I didn't think about it. — Iris Murdoch

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

I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better. — Iris Murdoch

let us not waste love, it is rare enough — Iris Murdoch

My personal peculiarities could not offend her since she was totally uninterested in my pretensions to be a person. — Iris Murdoch

We can only learn to love by loving. — Iris Murdoch

The best thing about being God would be making the heads. — Iris Murdoch

youth is a marvelous garment — Iris Murdoch

But to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right. — Iris Murdoch

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

We naturally take in the catastrophes of our friends a pleasure which genuinely does not preclude friendship. This is partly but not entirely because we enjoy being empowered as helpers. The unexpected or inappropriate catastrophe is especially piquant. — Iris Murdoch

One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats. — Iris Murdoch

Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time. — Iris Murdoch

Youth is a marvelous garment. How misplaced is the sympathy lavished on adolescents. There is a yet more difficult age which comes later, when one has less to hope for and less ability to change, when one has cast the die and has to settle into a chosen life without the consolations of habit or the wisdom of maturity, when, as in her own case, one ceases to be une jeune fille un peu folle, and becomes merely a woman, worst of all, a wife. The very young have their troubles, but they have at least a part to play, the part of being very young. — Iris Murdoch

Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture. It is perhaps most convincingly met with in simple people - inarticulate, unselfish mothers of large families - but these cases are also the least illuminating. — Iris Murdoch

While the light remains,' said Carde, speaking slowly in his high deliberate voice, 'only do not forsake the joy of life. If you shall have given all your kisses, you will give too few. And as leaves fall from withered wreaths which you may see spread upon the cups and floating there, so for us, who now as lovers hope for so much, perhaps tomorrow's day will close the doom. — Iris Murdoch

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. — Iris Murdoch

The notion that 'it all somehow must make sense', or 'there is a best decision here', preserves from despair: the difficulty is how to entertain this consoling notion in a way which is not false. — Iris Murdoch

Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun. — Iris Murdoch

The very madness of the scheme protects it. — Iris Murdoch

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph. — Iris Murdoch

Human beings crave for novelty and welcome even wars. Who opens the morning papers without the wild hope of huge headlines announcing another great disaster? Provided of course that it affects other people and not oneself. Rupert liked order. But there is no man who likes order who does not give houseroom to a man who dreams of disorder. The sudden wrecking of the accustomed scenery, so long as one can be fairly sure of a ringside seat, stimulates the bloodstream. And the instinctive need to feel protected and superior ensures, for most of the catastrophes of mankind, the shedding by those not immediately involved of but the most crocodile of tears. — Iris Murdoch

The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. — Iris Murdoch

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

Only lies and evil come from letting people off. — Iris Murdoch

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is. — Iris Murdoch

Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child. — Iris Murdoch

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

Good art shows us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how differently the world looks to an objective vision. — Iris Murdoch

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

Love generates, or rather reveals, something which may be called absolute charm. In the beloved nothing is gauche. Every move of the head, every tone of the voice, every laugh or grunt or cough or twitch of the nose is as valuable and revealing as a glimpse of paradise. — Iris Murdoch

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat
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'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working. — Iris Murdoch

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved — Iris Murdoch

there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart — Iris Murdoch

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish! — Iris Murdoch

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

Only the deeper parts of the mind have so little sense of time. — Iris Murdoch

The next day round about ten o'clock I was walking down Welbeck Street. I was in a bad temper. By daylight the whole project seemed very much less attractive. I felt that to be snubbed by a film star would put me in a bad state of mind for months. But I regarded the matter as something which had been decided and which now simply had to be carried out. I often used this method for deciding difficult cases. In stage one I entertain the thing purely as a hypothesis, and in stage two I count my stage one thinking as a fixed decision on which there is no going back. I recommend this technique to any of you who are not good at making decisions. — Iris Murdoch

There are no spare unrecorded encapsulated moments in which we can behave 'anyhow' and then expect to resume life where we left off. — Iris Murdoch

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way. — Iris Murdoch

The chief requirement of the good life', said Michael, 'is that one should have some conception of one's capacities. One must know oneself sufficiently to know what is the next thing. One must study carefully how best to use such strength as one has ... One must perform the lower act which one can manage and sustain: not the higher act which one bungles. — Iris Murdoch

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

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness! — Iris Murdoch

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed. — Iris Murdoch

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

Religion is having an intense attitude and no time off... religion is about those awful deep things. — Iris Murdoch

The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young. — Iris Murdoch

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing. — Iris Murdoch

The lover readily imagines that he and his mistress are one. He feels he has love enough for both and that his loving will can swathe the two of them together like twin nuts in a shell. But what one loves is, after all, another human being, a person with other interests, other pains, in whose world one is oneself an object among others. — Iris Murdoch

What we really are seems much more like an obscure system of energy out of which choices and visible acts of will emerge at intervals in ways which are often unclear and often dependent on the condition of the system in between moments of choice. — Iris Murdoch

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies. — Iris Murdoch

It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion. — 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

Every artist is an unhappy lover. — Iris Murdoch

Confession ran in the family. — Iris Murdoch

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge. — Iris Murdoch

All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods. — Iris Murdoch

As soon as any idea is a consolation the tendency to falsify it becomes strong: hence the traditional problem of preventing the idea of God from degenerating in the believer's mind. — Iris Murdoch

What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school? — Iris Murdoch

How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing. — Iris Murdoch

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing. — Iris Murdoch

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous. — Iris Murdoch

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait. — Iris Murdoch

An experience is richest not talked of. — Iris Murdoch

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

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

Disapproving of things is all right. But you mustn't disapprove of people. It cuts you off. — Iris Murdoch

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story. — Iris Murdoch

The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future. — Iris Murdoch

A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people. — Iris Murdoch

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch. — Iris Murdoch

Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair. — Iris Murdoch

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself. — Iris Murdoch

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base. — Iris Murdoch

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

What I needed with all my starved and silent soul was just that particular way of shouting back at the world. — Iris Murdoch

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic. — Iris Murdoch

(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!') — Iris Murdoch

A less courageous person would have felt that it was too late, they would have felt ashamed, they would think wellI don't want this, I know I shall hate it, it's all wrong, but I'm so involved now I'll have to put up with it, and I know that later on I'll keep on wishing that I'd had the nerve to say no, even at the last minute ... — Iris Murdoch

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value. — Iris Murdoch