Quote

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Iris Murdoch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Faces
Artist
Art
Cunning
Anything
Final
Soul
Finals
Human
Gods
Humans
Face
Would
Rather

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Real worship involves waiting.
Iris Murdoch
Image
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch
Image
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
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