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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.

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
Silence
Almost
Spirit
Truth
Human
Humans
Attained
Touches
Divine

More quotes by 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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Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
Iris Murdoch
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It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
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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.
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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Iris Murdoch
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Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
Iris Murdoch
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Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
Iris Murdoch
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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
Iris Murdoch
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The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
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we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.
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to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
Iris Murdoch
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The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Iris Murdoch
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All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
Iris Murdoch
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A death is the most terrible of facts.
Iris Murdoch
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There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Iris Murdoch
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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
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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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
Iris Murdoch