Iris Murdoch quotes:

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

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.

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

That's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!

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.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

We can only learn to love by loving.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

Anything that consoles is fake.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown."

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.

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.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.

Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected.

Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness!

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

Most real relationships are involuntary.

The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomimes.

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

Never seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.

Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.

We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...

Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.

Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

I think the novel is essentially a comic form (tragedy is for the theatre), not meaning by that full of jokes, but that it is about the absurd detail of human life, the way in which one cannot fully understand what is happening. Life is muddle and jumble and ends inconclusively, and when this is presented with great comic art the sorrows of human life can be truthfully conveyed; one is moved by the spectacle, and feels that something truthful has been told in a magic way.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff ourselves and we go away depressed and disappointed and probably feeling a bit queasy into the bargain. It's an image of the déçu in human existence. A greedy start and a stupefied finish. Waiters, who are constantly observing this cycle, must be the most disillusioned of men.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.

I just enjoy translating, it's like opening one's mouth and hearing someone else's voice emerge.

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 ...

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

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

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

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.

It is difficult in life to be good, and difficult in art to portray goodness. Perhaps we don't know much about goodness.

The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.

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.

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.

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.

Food is a profound subject and one, incidentally, about which no writer lies.

The best thing about being God would be making the heads.

Being in love is an exhausting business.

Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.

Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life's bright mysterious expectations.

... where does one person end and another person begin?

... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.

It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.

... 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.

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern...

Real worship involves waiting.

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.

We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.

A death is the most terrible of facts.

The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement.

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

Every artist is an unhappy lover.

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.

I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

youth is a marvelous garment

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.