Iris Murdoch
It is in the capacity to love, that is to SEE, that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists. The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion. What I have called fantasy, the proliferation of blinding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy, and most of what is often called 'will' or 'willing' belongs to this system. What counteracts the system is attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.Collection: Love
Most real relationships are involuntary.Collection: Real
Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.Collection: Artist
confession ran in the family.Collection: Confession
A letter is a barrier, a reprieve, a charm against the world, an almost infallible method of acting at a distance.Collection: Distance
It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion.Collection: Sports
... he felt himself to be one of them, who can live neither in the world nor out of it. They are a kind of sick people, whose desire for God makes them unsatisfactory citizens of an ordinary life, but whose strength or temperament fails them to surrender the world completely; and present-day society, with its hurried pace and its mechanical and technical structure, offers no home to these unhappy souls.Collection: Home
Art is a kind of artificial memory and the pain which attends all serious art is a sense of that factitiousness.Collection: Art
Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Mean
I am not famous for anything in particular. I am just famous.Collection: Particular
Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair.Collection: Children
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereavedCollection: Love
How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.Collection: Happiness
A death is the most terrible of facts.Collection: Death
any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.Collection: Book
The notion that one can liberate another soul from captivity is an illusion of the very young.Collection: Soul
Of course men play roles, but women play roles too, blanker ones. They have, in the play of life, fewer good lines.Collection: Men
there is a natural tribal hostility between the married and the unmarried. I cannot stand the shows so often quite instinctively put on by married people to insinuate that they are not only more fortunate but in some way more moral than you are.Collection: People
My heart was beating like an army on the march.Collection: Heart
Every artist is an unhappy lover.Collection: Philosophical
being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does.Collection: Character
Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.Collection: Art
Nothing is more maddening than being questioned by the object of one's interest about the object of hers, should that object not be you.Collection: Should
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.Collection: Void
Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.Collection: Coffee
The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.Collection: Inspirational
We re all muddlers. The thing is to see is when one's got to stop muddling.Collection: Disorder
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.Collection: Dog
Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.Collection: Happiness
Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children.Collection: Children
The theatre is a tragic place, full of endings and partings and heartbreak.Collection: Theatre
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.Collection: Reading
we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.Collection: Thinking
What makes you imagine ... that anything of importance can be taught in a school?Collection: School
Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.Collection: Holiday
Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.Collection: Art
The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.Collection: Life
We defend ourselves by descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.Collection: World
... when caught unawares I usually tell the truth, and what's duller than that?Collection: Telling The Truth
I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one toCollection: Philosophy
Nothing is more beautifully and acceptably self-assertive than good singing.Collection: Self
Music relates sound and time and so pictures the ultimate edges of human commmunications.Collection: Sound
People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.Collection: Passion
Eating reveals the characteristic grossness of the human race and also the in-built failure of its satisfactions. We arrive eager, we stuff ourselves and we go away depressed and disappointed and probably feeling a bit queasy into the bargain. It's an image of the déçu in human existence. A greedy start and a stupefied finish. Waiters, who are constantly observing this cycle, must be the most disillusioned of men.Collection: Men
There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good.Collection: Triumph
Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning.Collection: Art
Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.Collection: Memories
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars.Collection: Marriage