Quotes from Iris Murdoch

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.

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

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

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

Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.

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

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

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

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

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

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

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

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.

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

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

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

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

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

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.

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