Quotes By Iris Murdoch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

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

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

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

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

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

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

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

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

Anything that consoles is fake.

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

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

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

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

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