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

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
Matter
Good
Temperament
Goodness
Literature
Ends

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.
Iris Murdoch
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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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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Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
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to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
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He was a sociologist he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
Iris Murdoch
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Every artist is an unhappy lover.
Iris Murdoch
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They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
Iris Murdoch
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.
Iris Murdoch
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Real worship involves waiting.
Iris Murdoch
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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
Iris Murdoch
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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
Iris Murdoch
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Freedom is not choosing that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.
Iris Murdoch
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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
Iris Murdoch
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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
Iris Murdoch
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Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
Iris Murdoch