Quote

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

Iris Murdoch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Iris Murdoch
Age: 79 †
Born: 1919
Born: July 15
Died: 1999
Died: February 8
Author
Biographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Professor
Prosaist
Writer
Dublin city
Jean Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch
Live
Great
Beirut
Life
Task
World
Tasks
Fantasy
Illusion
Reality
Find

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
Iris Murdoch
Image
The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Iris Murdoch
Image
What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
Iris Murdoch
Image
So we live a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
Iris Murdoch
Image
A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
Iris Murdoch
Image
... 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
Image
The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Iris Murdoch
Image
It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
Iris Murdoch
Image
It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
Iris Murdoch
Image
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
Image
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
Iris Murdoch
Image
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Iris Murdoch