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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
Image
Oneself
Live
Without
Good
Requirement
Life
Requirements
Chief
Chiefs

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
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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.
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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
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It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
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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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Real worship involves waiting.
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All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
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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.
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The very madness of the scheme protects it.
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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One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
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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
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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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Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
Iris Murdoch
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Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
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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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
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Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch