Quote

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

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
Time
Moment
Plunge
Lost
Void
Death
Final
Unremembered
Spirit
Finals
Broods
Moments
Meaning
Plunges
Ends
Came
Hovers
Back
Face
Chop
Live
Faces
Continual

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

Image
The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.
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
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.
Iris Murdoch
Image
we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.
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
On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?
Iris Murdoch
Image
Real misery cuts off all paths to itself.
Iris Murdoch
Image
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.
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
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.
Iris Murdoch
Image
for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter.
Iris Murdoch
Image
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
Image
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.
Iris Murdoch
Image
We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.
Iris Murdoch
Image
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
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