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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

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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
Even
Satisfaction
Busy
Secret
Light
Reason
Live
Inwardness
Self
Vital
Must
Remarkable

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
Iris Murdoch
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One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.
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Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
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All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
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Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
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All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.
Iris Murdoch
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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.
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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.
Iris Murdoch
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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
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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.
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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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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
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A death is the most terrible of facts.
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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Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
Iris Murdoch
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The bereaved cannot communicate with the unbereaved.
Iris Murdoch
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved
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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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