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
Inward
Amazing
Creatures
Secret
Reason
Even
Thing
Inwardness

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
Iris Murdoch
Image
It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.
Iris Murdoch
Image
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Iris Murdoch
Image
The very madness of the scheme protects it.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Iris Murdoch
Image
youth is a marvelous garment
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.
Iris Murdoch
Image
There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.
Iris Murdoch
Image
You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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