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It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.

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
Everyone
Else
Enough
Must
Fail
Succeed
Failing

More quotes by Iris Murdoch

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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
Iris Murdoch
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Daytime sleep is a cursed slumber from which one wakes in despair.
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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Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
Iris Murdoch
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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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A middling talent makes for a more serene life.
Iris Murdoch
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I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
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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You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.
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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One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
Iris Murdoch
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We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
Iris Murdoch
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
Iris Murdoch
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Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
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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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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Language is a machine for making falsehoods.
Iris Murdoch
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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
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All our failures are ultimately failures in love.
Iris Murdoch