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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
Oneself
Live
Without
Requirement
Good
Requirements
Life
Chief
Chiefs
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More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
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It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
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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.
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
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Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
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For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
Iris Murdoch
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Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
Iris Murdoch
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A death is the most terrible of facts.
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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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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All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
Iris Murdoch
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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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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
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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It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
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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... 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
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
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