Quotes from Iris Murdoch

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

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

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

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

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

Anything that consoles is fake.

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

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.

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

A middling talent makes for a more serene life.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

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

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.

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

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

Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.

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