Quote

A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.

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
Letters
Method
Distance
Reprieve
Almost
Barrier
Acting
Infallible
World
Letter
Barriers
Charm

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
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
Image
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
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
Image
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We must live by the light of our own self-satisfaction, through that secret vital busy inwardness which is even more remarkable than our reason.
Iris Murdoch
Image
There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Iris Murdoch