Quote

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

Iris Murdoch

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Scheme
Schemes
Madness
Protect
Plans
Protects

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Iris Murdoch
Image
... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
Iris Murdoch
Image
there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Iris Murdoch
Image
There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
Iris Murdoch
Image
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
... 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
Image
He was a sociologist he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
Iris Murdoch