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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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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
Upon
Artist
Inspirational
Potent
Laid
Command
Sacred
Wait
Waiting

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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He was a sociologist he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
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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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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.
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A death is the most terrible of facts.
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The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
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Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
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It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.
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Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
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Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
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Freedom is not choosing that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.
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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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As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
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youth is a marvelous garment
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to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
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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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The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
Iris Murdoch
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch