Iris Murdoch Quotes

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.

The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.

The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.

All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)

The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.

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

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

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

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

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

Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

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