Iris Murdoch Quotes
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The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
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Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
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until I have been able to bury my head so deep in dear London that I can forget that I have ever been away I am inconsolable.
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Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.
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Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
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In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.
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The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.
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Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.
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Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
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There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.
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... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.
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The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.
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Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
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emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.
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Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
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Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.
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Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.
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It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
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A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
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We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
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Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
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The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.
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Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
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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.
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