Quote

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

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
Thing
Inwardness
Inward
Amazing
Creatures
Secret
Reason
Even

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Iris Murdoch
Image
there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.
Iris Murdoch
Image
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
Iris Murdoch
Image
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
Image
It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!
Iris Murdoch
Image
Real worship involves waiting.
Iris Murdoch
Image
The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.
Iris Murdoch
Image
we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.
Iris Murdoch
Image
They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
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
He was a sociologist he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Iris Murdoch
Image
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
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
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