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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

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

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
Iris Murdoch
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A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.
Iris Murdoch
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We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
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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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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Most real relationships are involuntary.
Iris Murdoch
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Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
Iris Murdoch
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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
Iris Murdoch
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Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
Iris Murdoch
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People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
Iris Murdoch
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The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
Iris Murdoch
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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Iris Murdoch
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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
Iris Murdoch