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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

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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
Shape
Shapes
Lived
Meaning
Art
Give
Giving
Psychoanalysis
Life
Adore

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Iris Murdoch
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The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.
Iris Murdoch
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Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
Iris Murdoch
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... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.
Iris Murdoch
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Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
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
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To be a complete victim may be another source of power.
Iris Murdoch
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The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
Iris Murdoch
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Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.
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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Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
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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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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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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The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.
Iris Murdoch
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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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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A death is the most terrible of facts.
Iris Murdoch