Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Iris Murdoch

Quote by Iris Murdoch

Work

The Green Knight

This classic tale of chivalry and adventure is set in the medieval period and explores themes of honor, bravery, and the supernatural. The protagonist, a knight, faces a daunting challenge from the enigmatic Green Knight, leading to a series of events that test his character and resolve. more

Author

Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch was an Irish-Canadian philosopher and author, born on July 15, 1919, in Dublin, Ireland, and passed away on February 8, 1999. She is celebrated for her philosophical novels that intertwine moral and ethical dilemmas with complex narratives. Murdoch's work has left a lasting impact on the literary world, particularly in the latter half of the 20th century. more

You May Also Like

“Beyond her declaration of love she could not see. But as she rehearsed the intensity of her passion she thought that he must, when the time came, respond. The desire to, at the right time, tell him became, as the years moved forward toward that time, increasingly painful, like a poisoned wound that must heal itself by breaking open. She now thought in anguish of the times, the recent times, when she could have told him, and had been afraid to, and had clumsily withdrawn, when she could have attracted him and drawn his attention to her. When she had watched over him when he was sleeping in the sedan-chair and could have wakened him with a kiss. If only she had let him know, then she could more easily have borne his not preferring her. He was ready to fall in love — and if he had known — he must have loved her — if he had known how much she loved him. The pain of this loss burnt her in every waking moment, that awful 'if only'. She had lost him, and lost him through her own fault. There were no more pleasures now in life.”

SufferingLossIris MurdochUnrequited LoveHeartbrokenUnspokenThe Green KnightMissed OpportunityIf OnlyMissed Chance
Book:The Green Knight
Create image

“People of Earth know nothing about the heart. And the ones who do, address love as the need to bleed. And it is indeed so. This materialistic world of mentally-obsessed humanoids will never allow true love to show itself. The ones who possess a better understanding often walk alone, love alone, and feel alone, with their partners, groups and the world itself. Altruism is not a disease, a curse or a punishment, although it usually feels that way. Altruism is not even a price we pay for being spiritually free. Altruism, as death or birth, is just what it is. It just happens. The feelings attached to it are merely an awakening to the realization of the gap between oneself and the remaining of his prehistoric ancestors. One moves apart, into the future, in his evolution, and looks back at his brothers and sisters, trapped in the dogmas of the past, not realizing one can’t travel in time in body but only in spirit. And in this sense, none of us ever escapes the prison. Not in body. Only in mind. The mind has the key we look for outside ourselves. The heart helps the blind of spirit find it. And when humanity, as a whole, realizes this, it will ascend. But for now, unfortunately, many will have to suffer and pay with their own life, before this realization becomes common sense. Before the many books that have been written, are finally read by the masses and understood as they were intended by the creators. Before we realize that all the wars are being fought in our mind and merely being represented in the material playground like a theatrical play to which we all contribute with our own mental script, daily written and adjusted by the collective conscience and its concepts of right and wrong, true and false, justice and injustice, real and unreal.”

SufferingDepressionRacismAngerInjusticeBullyingAggressionWars
Author:Robin Sacredfire
Create image

“The world we are trying to transcend is not the physical world of air, sunlight, and ocean. After all, that world, even with all of its problems, is an amazingly beautiful world. Our problem is with the world that mind has constructed. Can we see that there is a mental world that we have created somewhere in our consciousness? It is a mind-created world that we have been living in forever. When we open our eyes, we see the outer world. We can walk outside near the ocean for just ten or twenty minutes and we see a beautiful world with sand, rocks, waves; the ocean is singing a song. It is a beautiful world. There is nothing wrong with that world. It is perfect, sacred in itself. The world that we must transcend is the world that mind has constructed. That world has lots of problems, lots of drama, lots of stories, and lots of suffering. It's a forever spinning wheel of painfulness, agony, and so forth.”

WorldMindRealitySufferingNatureConsciousnessTranscendenceMental World
Book:The Magic of Awareness
Create image

“In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him — if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking — then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”

LifeSufferingFree WillWillConsequencesRulesLawsCausation
Book:The Problem of Pain
Create image

“Robin, he chided her. He wanted to tell her all this would happen to her, too, that her luck would turn as well. But he had no good arguments for this, and she had no reason to believe him. Such luck as his was far too rare. “I hope it all works out,” she said, looking up, and then, as if afraid to sound too stingy, she added, “I’m sure it will.” He bent down to kiss her, but she turned away slightly, and his lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “Please be happy for me.”

LoveHappinessScienceSufferingLuck
Book:Intuition
Create image