Iris Murdoch Quotes

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

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life. Still no letters.

(I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!')

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

Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom

"Sometimes I felt I would die by wishing it when I went to sleep but I always woke up again and found I was still there. Every morning finding I'm still me, that's hell."

"Well, get out of hell then! The gate's open and I'm holding it!"

"I can't. I'm hell, myself."

It was her birthday. She thought, I am always unhappy on this day.

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

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

I had deluded myself throughout by the idea of reviving a secret love which did not exist at all.

The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak. You dedicate yourself passionately to something, to a project, to people, to a family, you think of nothing else for weeks and months, then suddenly it's over, it's perpetual destruction, perpetual divorce, perpetual adieu. It's like éternel retour, it's a koan. It's like falling in love and being smashed over and over again.’
'You do, then, fall in love.’
'Only with fictions, I love players, but actors are so ephemeral. And then there’s waiting for the perfect part, and being offered it the day after you've committed yourself to something utterly rotten. The remorse, and the envy and the jealousy. An old actor told me if I wanted to stay in the trade I had better kill off envy and jealousy at the start.

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.