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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

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
Generalizing
Descriptions
Tame
Description
Defend
World

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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youth is a marvelous garment
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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
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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.
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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
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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.
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Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Iris Murdoch
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We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
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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Every artist is an unhappy lover.
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Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
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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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Iris Murdoch
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The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
Iris Murdoch
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evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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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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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
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Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
Iris Murdoch
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
Iris Murdoch
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Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Iris Murdoch