Quotes from Iris Murdoch

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

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

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

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

I hate solitude, but I'm afraid of intimacy. The substance of my life is a private conversation with myself which to turn into a dialogue would be equivalent to self-destruction. The company which I need is the company which a pub or a cafe will provide. I have never wanted a communion of souls. It's already hard enough to tell the truth to oneself.

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

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

One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

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

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch. But given the state of the world, is it wise?

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. But we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. Most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. We are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and... pass the gravy.

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.

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.

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

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.