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

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
Life
Ordinariness
Piercing
Unhappiness
Midst
Sadness

More quotes by 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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youth is a marvelous garment
Iris Murdoch
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Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote 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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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch
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Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
Iris Murdoch
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
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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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.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Iris Murdoch
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They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
Iris Murdoch
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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
Iris Murdoch
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Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Iris Murdoch
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Every artist is an unhappy lover.
Iris Murdoch
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Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
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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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Iris Murdoch
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Real worship involves waiting.
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