Iris Murdoch Quotes About Reality

Quotes about: Reality

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Life, Reality, Tasks

  In 'The Times' 15 April 1983 'Profile'

• Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.

  Iris Murdoch

  Love, Inspirational, Real

  "Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature".

• Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Real, Love Is

  1959 'The Sublime and the Good'.

• 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

  Hero, Divorce, Fighting

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Sea, The Sea”, p.296, Penguin

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Nice, Women, Reality

  The Red and the Green ch. 2 (1965)

• 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.

  Iris Murdoch

  Love, Powerful, Reality

• 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

  Believe, Reality, Ideas

  Iris Murdoch (1967). “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts”, p.33, Psychology Press

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