Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.

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

All our failures are ultimately failures in love.

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

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.

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

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

Being in love is an exhausting business.

Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.

True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.

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.

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

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

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

You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

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

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them.

Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.

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

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.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them.

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.