Iris Murdoch Quotes

The same virtues, in the end, the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. One-seeking intelligence is the image of faith.

El sexo es un invento absurdo que a pesar de serlo no aspira más que hincharse y penetrar. Se supone que tiene algo que ver con el amor, por lo menos ésa es su leyenda, pero el amor es un mito estimulante y aunque no lo fuese no podría tener relación alguna con el sexo. No mezclamos el amor con la comida, ¿verdad? Ni con el hipo o sonarse la nariz. ¿Y con la respiración? o con la circulación de la sangre o el funcionamiento del hígado. Entonces, ¿por qué relacionarlo con nuestro curioso impulso a meter partes de nosotros mismos dentro del cuerpo de otras personas? ¿O con ese otro impulso igualmente curioso de apretar nuestra maloliente boca y picados dientes en orificios igualmente blanduchos y salivosos de otros cuerpos?

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

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

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

How easily one is hurt. Or is it only I who am so stupidly vulnerable.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. 'Good is a transcendent reality' means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.

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

Anything that consoles is fake.

But I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always.

I'm not young. I've never had any youth.

Was this strange mode of life to go on and on?

"I feel I'm at the end of something — everything is going to be different — and terrible."

"That doesn't sound like you, you ride every wave."

"There is one that will drown me."

Kant abolished God and made man God in His stead. We are still living in the age of the Kantian man, or Kantian man-god. Kant's conclusive exposure of the so-called proofs of the existence of God, his analysis of the limitations of speculative reason, together with his eloquent portrayal of the dgnity of rational man, has had results which might possibly dismay him. How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundelgung, who confronted even with Christ turns away to consider the judgment of his own conscience and to hear the voice of his own reason. Stripped of the exiguous metaphysical background which Kant was prepared to allow him, this man is with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, rational, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. The raison d'etre of this attractive but misleading creature is not far to seek. He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation from the material universe which his discoveries reveal; and since he is not a Hegelian (Kant, not Hegel, has provided Western ethics with its dominating image) his alienation is without cure. He is the ideal citizen of the liberal state, a warning held up to tyrants. He has the virtue which the age requires and admires, courage. It is not such a very long step from Kant to Nietzsche, and from Nietzsche to existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines which in some ways closely resemble it. In fact Kant's man had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.