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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
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Dublin city
Jean Iris Murdoch
Dame Iris Murdoch
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More quotes by Iris Murdoch
Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
Iris Murdoch
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
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
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
Iris Murdoch
What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
Iris Murdoch
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Iris Murdoch
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Iris Murdoch
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
Most real relationships are involuntary.
Iris Murdoch
... 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
The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.
Iris Murdoch
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
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
Iris Murdoch
Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
Iris Murdoch
Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Iris Murdoch
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Iris Murdoch
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
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Iris Murdoch
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
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
