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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
Art
Give
Giving
Psychoanalysis
Life
Adore
Shape
Shapes
Lived
Meaning

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.
Iris Murdoch
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What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?
Iris Murdoch
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Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
Iris Murdoch
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Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
Iris Murdoch
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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
Iris Murdoch
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Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
Iris Murdoch
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On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
Iris Murdoch
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Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.
Iris Murdoch
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Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
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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Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.
Iris Murdoch
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Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Iris Murdoch
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It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.
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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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
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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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For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.
Iris Murdoch
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Every artist is an unhappy lover.
Iris Murdoch