Iris Murdoch Quotes - Page 6

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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.

  Iris Murdoch

  Hurt, Revenge, Vanity

  Iris Murdoch (2008). “The Philosopher's Pupil”, p.81, Random House

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Relationship, Happiness, Marriage

  Iris Murdoch (1976). “A Severed Head”, p.148, Penguin

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• I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to

  Iris Murdoch

  Philosophy, Thinking, Ideas

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• 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.

  Iris Murdoch

  Personality, World, Emotion

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Sea, The Sea”, p.49, Penguin

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• We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

  Iris Murdoch

  Names, Cures, Prisoner

  Iris Murdoch (1987). “The Unicorn”, p.76, Penguin

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• The most interesting things are always happening behind one.

  Iris Murdoch

  Interesting, Behinds, Happenings

  Iris Murdoch (1956). “The flight from the enchanter”, Viking Pr

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• 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.

  Iris Murdoch

  Summer, God, Mother

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• 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.

  Iris Murdoch

  Loneliness, Games, Soul

  Iris Murdoch (2003). “The Black Prince”, p.89, Penguin

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• I hate solitude but I am afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself and to turn it into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls.

  Iris Murdoch

  Hate, Self, Soul

  "Under the Net".

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Sadness, Piercings, Unhappiness

  Iris Murdoch (2008). “A Word Child”, p.3, Random House

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Disorder

  Iris Murdoch (2008). “A Word Child”, p.362, Random House

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• 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.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Opportunity, Order

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• Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

  Iris Murdoch

  Art, Art Is, Concealment

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• Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.

  Iris Murdoch

  Should, Interest, Be You

  Iris Murdoch (1961). “Under the Net: A Novel”

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• Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

  Iris Murdoch

  Coffee, Made, Very Good

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Sea, The Sea”, p.90, Penguin

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Inspirational, Artist, Waiting

  Iris Murdoch (2003). “The Black Prince”, p.25, Penguin

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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

  Life, Hurt, Pride

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• being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.

  Iris Murdoch

  Character, Men, Doe

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “A Fairly Honourable Defeat”, p.22, Penguin

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

  Iris Murdoch

  Dog, Cat, Different

  Iris Murdoch (2003). “From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch”, p.155, Univ of South Carolina Press

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• 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.

  Iris Murdoch

  Happiness, Reading, Animal

  Iris Murdoch (2001). “The Sea, The Sea”, p.30, Penguin

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• to be understood is not a human right. Even to understand oneself is not a human right.

  Iris Murdoch

  Understood, Humans, Oneself

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• There is nothing like the bootless solitude of those who are caged together.

  Iris Murdoch

  Solitude, Together, Caged

  Iris Murdoch (2003). “The Black Prince”, p.89, Penguin

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• 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.

  Iris Murdoch

  Children, Dirty, Anxiety

  Iris Murdoch (2003). “The Black Prince”, p.69, Penguin

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• The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.

  Iris Murdoch

  Theatre, Tragic, Parting

  Iris Murdoch (2013). “The Green Knight”, p.58, Open Road Media

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• Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

  Iris Murdoch

  Love, Grief, Saying Goodbye

  Iris Murdoch (1984). “The Sacred and Profane Love Machine”, p.31, Penguin

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