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All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

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
Failures
Ultimately
Failure
Love

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
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There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
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Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
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They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
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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The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Iris Murdoch
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The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
Iris Murdoch
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Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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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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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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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
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As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
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