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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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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
Without
Good
Requirement
Life
Requirements
Chief
Chiefs
Image
Oneself
Live

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
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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.
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We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
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Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.
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Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
Iris Murdoch
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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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... 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.
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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
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In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
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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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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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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.
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.
Iris Murdoch
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The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
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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... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
Iris Murdoch
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Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Iris Murdoch