Source: An Unofficial Rose: A Novel
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Famous Iris Murdoch Quotes
“Being in love is an exhausting business.”
Source: An Unofficial Rose: A Novel
“Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.”
Source: A Fairly Honourable Defeat
“Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.”
Source: A Severed Head, The Black Prince, The Sea, The Sea
“... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.”
Source: The Sea, The Sea
Source: Nuns and Soldiers
Source: The Black Prince
Source: Under the Net: A Novel
“We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom”
Source: The Unicorn
Source: Under the Net
Source: The Sea, The Sea
“The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.”
Source: THE RED AND THE GREEN
“They are universal places, like churches, hallowed meeting places of all mankind.”
Source: The book and the brotherhood
Source: The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts
Source: The Black Prince
“Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.”
“There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.”
Source: The Black Prince
“The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.”
Source: The Green Knight
Source: Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature
“We can only learn to love by loving.”
Source: The Bell
Source: A Severed Head
“Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”
Source: A Severed Head
“Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.”
Source: The Message To The Planet
“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”
“We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.”
Source: A Fairly Honourable Defeat
“Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.”
Source: The Message To The Planet
Source: The Black Prince
“Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.”
Source: The book and the brotherhood
“Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.”
“There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.”
Source: A Severed Head
“I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.”
Source: The Message To The Planet
“In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.”
Source: Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature
Source: The Nice and the Good
Source: The Black Prince
“A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.”
“Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.”
Source: The Nice and the Good
Source: Henry and Cato
“Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.”
Source: Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature
Source: The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts