Quote

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

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
Invigorates
Consoling
Greatest
Art
Without

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Iris Murdoch
Image
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
Iris Murdoch
Image
One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
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
Image
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch
Image
It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
Iris Murdoch
Image
To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.
Iris Murdoch
Image
How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
Iris Murdoch