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The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.

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
May
Destroying
Ever
Vanity
Self
Passing
Great
Sin
Thing
Pride
Life
Hurt
Murderous
Small
Obsession
Someone
Passings

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
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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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The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
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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.
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The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
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.
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What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
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Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
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there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.
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Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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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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It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
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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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
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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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Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Iris Murdoch