Iris Murdoch
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.Collection: Moving
We can only learn to love by loving.Collection: Love
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Marriage
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.Collection: Women
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.Collection: Art
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.Collection: Wisdom
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.Collection: Equality
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.Collection: Life
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.Collection: Space
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.Collection: Love
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.Collection: Relationship
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.Collection: Art
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.Collection: Nature
The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.Collection: Marriage
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Anything that consoles is fake.
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.Collection: Happy Life
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.Collection: Silence
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.Collection: Inspirational
Remember that the secret of all learning is patience and that curiosity is not the same thing as a thirst for knowledge.Collection: Learning
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.Collection: Mean
Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.Collection: Love
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.Collection: Happiness
Language is a machine for making falsehoods.Collection: Inspirational
Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Healing
Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Lying
Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.Collection: Love
Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.Collection: Love Is