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What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?

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
Anything
Importance
Taught
Imagine
Makes
School

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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He was a sociologist he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Iris Murdoch
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Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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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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We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
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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Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
Iris Murdoch
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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom
Iris Murdoch
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
Iris Murdoch
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Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
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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Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
Iris Murdoch
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I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
Iris Murdoch
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... 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
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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.
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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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
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