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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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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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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.
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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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One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
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The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
Iris Murdoch
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Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Iris Murdoch
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What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
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All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
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 middling talent makes for a more serene life.
Iris Murdoch
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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
Iris Murdoch
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Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
Iris Murdoch
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We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
Iris Murdoch
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
Iris Murdoch
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Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
Iris Murdoch
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Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
Iris Murdoch