Iris Murdoch Quotes

Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.

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

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.

"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."

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.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

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.

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

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.

emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.

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.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.

Anything that consoles is fake.

Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.