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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

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
Truth
Civilisation
Call
Cannot

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
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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.
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Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
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All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
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A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.
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Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
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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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It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
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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.
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The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.
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The most interesting things are always happening behind one.
Iris Murdoch
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evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it.
Iris Murdoch
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Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
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Most real relationships are involuntary.
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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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There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Iris Murdoch
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For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
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