Iris Murdoch's Quotes

Anything that consoles is fake.

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

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

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

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

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

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

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

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

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

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

We can only learn to love by loving.

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.

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

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

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

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

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

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

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

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.