1919-, British Novelist, Philosopher
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Iris Murdoch – [Critics and Criticism]
A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the fatade of his appearance.
Iris Murdoch – [Appearance]
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
Iris Murdoch – [Virtue]
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Iris Murdoch – [Arts and Artists]
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Iris Murdoch – [Goodness]
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
Iris Murdoch – [Bereavement]
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Iris Murdoch – [Fantasy]
Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
Iris Murdoch – [Lovers]
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Iris Murdoch – [Love Ended]
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.
Iris Murdoch – [Happiness]
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Iris Murdoch – [Sociology]
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Iris Murdoch – [Humankind]
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
Iris Murdoch – [Worship]
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 – [Women]
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 – [Marriage]
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Iris Murdoch – [Philosophers and Philosophy]
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Iris Murdoch – [Literature]
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 – [Moralists]
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Iris Murdoch – [Love]
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 – [Judgment and Judges]