Quote

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

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
Love
Concept
Philosopher
Concepts
Philosophy
Moral
Mentioned
Need
Philosophers
Needs
Central
Made
Rarely

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
... 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
Image
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Iris Murdoch
Image
On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
Iris Murdoch
Image
The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
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
Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
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
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch
Image
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
Iris Murdoch
Image
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
Image
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Iris Murdoch
Image
As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch