Quote

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

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
Piercing
Unhappiness
Midst
Sadness
Life
Ordinariness

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
Iris Murdoch
Image
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
Image
What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
Iris Murdoch
Image
There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
Iris Murdoch
Image
It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
Iris Murdoch
Image
So we live a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
Iris Murdoch
Image
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch