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

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
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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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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
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It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
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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.
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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
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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.
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The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
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Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
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Every artist is an unhappy lover.
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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.
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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.
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They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
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The very madness of the scheme protects it.
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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.
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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.
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.
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How different each death is, and yet it leads us into the self-same country, that country which we inhabit so rarely, where we see the worthlessness of what we have long pursued and will so soon return to pursuing.
Iris Murdoch