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Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

Iris Murdoch

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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
Better
Misguided
Indifference
Confused
Perhaps
Passion
Moral

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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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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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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.
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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
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What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
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All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
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The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
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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.
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
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As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
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We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
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Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
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Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
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The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.
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The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
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I have used the word attention, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.
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