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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
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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
Responsibility
Novelists
Inspirational
Ships
Action
Philosopher
May
Actions
Like
Sea
Watches
Watch
Cargo
Return
Port
More quotes by Iris Murdoch
They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
Iris Murdoch
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Iris Murdoch
To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
Iris Murdoch
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
youth is a marvelous garment
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
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
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
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
Iris Murdoch
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
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
... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
Iris Murdoch
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Iris Murdoch
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.
Iris Murdoch
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Iris Murdoch
Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world.
Iris Murdoch
Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
Iris Murdoch
We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch
Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Iris Murdoch
