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Iris Murdoch Quotes | Quotes said by Iris Murdoch

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #1

    —¿Me querrás siempre?

    —No tengo ni la menor idea.

    —Pues yo a ti te querré siempre.

    —Eso está bien. ¿Podremos meternos por ahí?

    —No, no creo... Tú eres Apolo y yo soy Marsyas. Acabarás dejándome.

    —Eso de Apolo y Marsyas es una buena imagen del amor.

    —¿Qué quieres decir?

    —Pues que la agonía de Marsyas es la inevitable agonía del alma humana en su deseo de llegar a Dios.

    —¡Cuántas cosas sabes!


  • Iris Murdoch Quote #2

    All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #3

    All the time when I speak to you, even now, I'm saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That's so even between us - and how much more it's so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one's so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #4

    Amo amas amat amamus amatis amant amavi amavisti amavit amavimus amavistis amaverunt amavero amaveris amaverit… Everything was love. Everything will be love. Everything has been love. Everything would be love. Everything would have been love. Ah, that was it, the truth at last. Everything would have been love. The huge eye, which had become an immense sphere, was gently breathing, only it was not an eye nor a sphere but a great wonderful animal covered in little waving legs like hairs, waving oh so gently as if they were under water. All shall be well and all shall be well said the ocean. So the place of reconciliation existed after all, not like a little knot hole in a cupboard but flowing everywhere and being everything. I had only to will it and it would be, for spirit is omnipotent only I never knew it, like being able to walk on the air. I could forgive. I could be forgiven. I could forgive. Perhaps that was the whole of it after all. Perhaps being forgiven was just forgiving only no one had ever told me. There was nothing else needful. Just to forgive. Forgiving equals being forgiven, the secret of the universe, do not whatever you do forget it. The past was folded up and in the twinkling of an eye everything had been changed and made beautiful and good.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #5

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

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #6

    As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #7

    Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #8

    Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #9

    But death is not easy, and life can win by simulating it.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #10

    But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #11

    Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #12

    Death is not the consummation of oneself but just the end of oneself. Before the self vanishes nothing really is, and that is how it is most of the time. But as soon as the self vanishes everything is, and becomes automatically the object of love. Love holds the world together, and if we could forget ourselves everything in the world would fly into a perfect harmony, and when we see beautiful things that is what they remind us of.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #13

    Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. 'Do you mean' she said, 'that they're completely imprisoned in there?'
    Mrs. Marks laughed. 'Not imprisoned, my dear,' she said. 'They are there of their own free will. This is not a prison. It is on the contrary a place which it is very hard to get into, and only the strongest achieve it. Like Mary in the parable, they have chosen the better part.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #14

    Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #15

    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?

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #16

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

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #17

    Every persisting marriage is based on fear', said Peregrine. 'Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what's at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower...

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #18

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

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #19

    God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #20

    Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #21

    However, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #22

    I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #23

    I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #24

    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.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #25

    I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves - and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #26

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

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #27

    If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #28

    In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #29

    It was a piece of thoroughly picturesque and proper violence. I like a violent man, really, a man who's a bit of a brute in a decent straightforward way.

  • Iris Murdoch Quote #30

    Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--'
    'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.

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