Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

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

It was extremely difficult to keep up any pace over the rocks since they were so unpredictable and devoid of reason. Their senselessness had never so much impressed me.

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

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

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

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

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

Sartre turns love into a 'battle between two hypnotists in a closed room'.

Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

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

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

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

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

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

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

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

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

Language is a machine for making falsehoods.

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

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

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.