Iris Murdoch

“The division of one day from the next must be one of the most profound peculiarities of life on this planet. We are not condemned to sustained flights of being, but are constantly refreshed by little holidays from ourselves. We are intermittent creatures, always falling to little ends and rising to new beginnings. Our soon-tired consciousness is meted out in chapters, and that the world will look quite different tomorrow is, both for our comfort and our discomfort, usually true. How marvelously too night matches sleep, sweet image of it, so nearly apportioned to our need. Angels must wonder at these beings who fall so regularly out of awareness into a fantasm-infested dark. How our frail identities survive these chasms no philosopher has ever been able to explain.”

“Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable.”

“Once in an endless meadow, just able to peer through the tawny haze of the grass tops, the child who was myself had watched a young fox catching mice, an elegant newly minted fox, straight from the hand of God, brilliantly ruddy, with black stockings and a white-tipped brush. The fox heard and turned. I saw its intense vivid mask, its liquid amber eyes. Then it was gone. An image of such beauty and such mysterious sense. The child wept and knew himself an artist.”

“There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.”

“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?”

“... 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.”

“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.”

“Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.”

“ We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom”

“...морето пред мен по-скоро свети, отколкото искри под ласкавото майско слънце. Със започването на прилива то кротко се обляга на сушата, почти необезпокоявано от гънките на вълни или пяна. Там нейде при хоризонта цветът му е разточително лилав, равномерно набразден с ивици смарагдово зелено. Самият хоризонт е виолетов. Близо до брега, където зрението ми се ограничава от надигащите се грамади гърбати жълти скали, има лента от по-бледозелено, ледена и бистра, не така сияйна, матова, а не прозрачна. Намираме се на север и ярките слънчеви лъчи не могат да проникнат в морето. Досами брега водата нежно облива скалите и повърхностният слой все още има цвят. Безоблачното небе е много бледо при виолетовият хоризонт и му придава леки сребристи отблясъци. Там, където морето и небето се сливат, синьото сгъстява боята си и пулсира. Но небето изглежда студено. Дори слънцето изглежда студено.”

“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.”

“Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.”

“If even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?”

“Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved”

“thinking about the misery of the world is a favourite contemporary occupation. and if you can't think the television set will think for you.”

“Toby had received, though not yet digested, one of the earliest lessons of adult life: that one is never secure. At any moment one can be removed from a state of guileless serenity and plunged into its opposite, without any intermediate condition, so high about us do the waters rise of our own and other people's imperfection.”

“The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life's most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.”

“We need to return from the self-centred concept of sincerity to the other-centred concept of truth. We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons. We need more concepts in terms of which to picture the substance of our being; it is through an enriching and deepening of concepts that moral progress takes place. Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention not of will. We need a new vocabulary of attention.”

“T. S. Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre, dissimilar enough as thinkers, both tend to undervalue prose and to deny it any imaginative function. Poetry is the creation of linguistic quasi-things; prose is for explanation and exposition, it is essentially didactic, documentary, informative. Prose is ideally transparent; it is only faute de mieux written in words. The influential modern stylist is Hemingway. It would be almost inconceivable now to write like Landor. Most modern English novels indeed are not written. One feels they could slip into some other medium without much loss. It takes a foreigner like Nabokov or an Irishman like Beckett to animate prose language into an imaginative stuff in its own right.”

“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.”

“What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.)”

“What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.”

“I ate and drank slowly as one should (cook fast, eat slowly) and without distractions such as (thank heavens) conversation or reading. Indeed eating is so pleasant one should even try to suppress thought. Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Every 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.”

“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.”

“To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea.”

“Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.”

“¿Cuál es la diferencia que existe entre yo y estas pequeñas y humildes criaturas? La araña teje su tela, no puede hacer otra cosa. Yo tejo mi conciencia, esta charlatana compulsiva, esta voz vaga y errabunda que pronto enmudecerá. Pero todo es un sueño. La realidad es demasiado dura.”

“Miles, que estaba de espaldas a Danby, levantó la cabeza del libro. Miró primero la cabeza inclinada de Diana y después la de Lisa. Cuando Diana comenzó a alzar la cabeza, Miles volvió su atención al libro. Diana miró primero la cabeza inclinada de Miles y después la cabeza inclinada de Lisa. Cuando ésta empezó a levantar la cabeza, Diana volvió su atención al libro. Lisa miró primero la cabeza inclinada de Diana y después la de Miles. Cuando éste comenzó a levantar la cabeza otra vez, Lisa volvió su atención al libro. Reinaba un profundo silencio.”

“Si se entiende por eternidad, no la duración temporal sin fin, sino la ausencia de tiempo, vive eternamente el que vive en el presente.”

“Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.”

“Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.”

“A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.”

“We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.”

“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.”

“white magic is black magic. a less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.”

“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.”

“emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the world is a stage.”

“Violence is born of the desire to escape oneself.”

“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...”

“Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. 'Do you mean' she said, 'that they're completely imprisoned in there?'Mrs. Marks laughed. 'Not imprisoned, my dear,' she said. 'They are there of their own free will. This is not a prison. It is on the contrary a place which it is very hard to get into, and only the strongest achieve it. Like Mary in the parable, they have chosen the better part.”

“Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.”

“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.”

“We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.”

“The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.”

“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.”

“In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all. ”

“Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an “austere, unselfish, candid” prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships,” she said. “And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy.”

“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.”

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality" says Iris Murdoch.But given the state of the world, is it wise?”

“The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.”