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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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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
Known
Junk
Unknown
Sell
Sells
Works
Genius
Easier

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
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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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Iris Murdoch
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There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
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
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch
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The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
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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Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Iris Murdoch
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We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
Iris Murdoch
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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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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.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
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
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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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youth is a marvelous garment
Iris Murdoch
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The sending of a letter constitutes a magical grasp upon the future.
Iris Murdoch