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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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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
Childhood
Understood
Bottomless
Probably
Compared
Child
Adult
Littles
Bitter
Little
Misery
Children
Despair
Even
Adults

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
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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.
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Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
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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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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
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A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
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Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
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The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
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Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
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We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
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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 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.
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Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
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They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
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We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
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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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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
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