Quote

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.

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
Life
Requirements
Chief
Chiefs
Image
Oneself
Live
Without
Good
Requirement

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
A death is the most terrible of facts.
Iris Murdoch
Image
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
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
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
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
Image
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
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 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
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
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Iris Murdoch
Image
To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
Iris Murdoch
Image
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Iris Murdoch