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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?

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
Begin
Another
Ends
Doe
Persons
Person
People
Connecting

More quotes by 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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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.
Iris Murdoch
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
Iris Murdoch
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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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The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
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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We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
Iris Murdoch
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The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
Iris Murdoch
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Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
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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Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.
Iris Murdoch
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Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
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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Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Iris Murdoch
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Time can divorce us from the reality of people, it can separate us from people and turn them into ghosts. Or rather it is we who turn them into ghosts or demons. Some kinds of fruitless preoccupations with the past can create such simulacra, and they can exercise power, like those heroes at Troy fighting for a phantom Helen.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
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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to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
Iris Murdoch
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Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
Iris Murdoch