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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.

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
Education
Situations
Since
Fundamental
Situation
Fundamentals
Literature
Essential
Understand
Essentials
Culture
Picture
Human
Aspect
Humans
Study

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
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Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
Iris Murdoch
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Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Iris Murdoch
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One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
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We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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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It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
Iris Murdoch
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All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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A death is the most terrible of facts.
Iris Murdoch
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The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch
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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
Iris Murdoch