Iris Murdoch
We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?Collection: Judging
Freedom is not choosing; that is merely the move that we make when all is already lost. Freedom is knowing and understanding and respecting things quite other than ourselves.Collection: Moving
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.Collection: Men
You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation.Collection: Truth
The best thing about being God would be making the heads.Collection: Would Be
We are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness is the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason.Collection: Secret
All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.Collection: Art
Our destiny can be examined, but it cannot be justified or totally explained. We are simply here.Collection: Inspirational
The entry of a child into any situation changes the whole situation.Collection: Children
I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.Collection: Believe
Real worship involves waiting.Collection: Faith
Words are the most subtle symbols which we possess and our human fabric depends on them.Collection: Fabric
The very madness of the scheme protects it.Collection: Madness
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.Collection: Passion
Another person's illness is often harder to bear than one's own.Collection: Bears
Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person is comic to his lover. The novel is a comic form. Language is a comic form, and makes jokes in its sleep. God, if He existed, would laugh at His creation. Yet it is also the case that life is horrible, without metaphysical sense, wrecked by chance, pain and the close prospect of death. Out of this is born irony, our dangerous and necessary tool.Collection: Pain
Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.Collection: Literature
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.Collection: Death
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.Collection: Failure
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.Collection: Dream
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.Collection: Sleep
Marriage isn't a tram. It doesn't have to get anywhere.Collection: Marriage
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.Collection: Art
... a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people.Collection: Spiritual
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.Collection: Doors
It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.Collection: Junk
Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.Collection: Struggle
Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.Collection: Hate
Jealousy comes from self-love rather than from true love.Collection: Jealousy
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.Collection: Book
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.Collection: Art
Most of our love is shabby stuff, but there is always a thin line of gold, the bit of pure love on which all the rest depends -- and which redeems all the rest.Collection: Love Is
When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.Collection: Desire
It is not enough that I succeed, everyone else must fail.Collection: Succeed
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.Collection: May
One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.Collection: Lying
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.Collection: Essentials
Not to have been born is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.Collection: Sleep
On connecting: Where does one person end and another person begin?Collection: People
Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.Collection: Moving
A middling talent makes for a more serene life.Collection: Talent
Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.Collection: Romance
I know girls aren’t supposed to tell, but I’ve got to tell – just in case you should fail to love me because you never knew how much I loved you. I want not to have to say later – I wish I’d told him.Collection: Romance