Iris Murdoch

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher, famed for her series of novels that combine rich characterization and compelling plotlines usually involving ethical or sexual themes. Her life-story was filmed in 2001 as Iris.

• He felt neither guilt nor distress at the pleasure with which he was now filled by the proximity of this young creature, and when he discovered in himself even physical symptoms of his inclination he did not take fright, but continued cheerfully and serenely to see Nick whenever the ordinary run of his duties suggested it, congratulating himself upon the newly achieved solidity and rational calm of his spiritual life.
  • The Bell (1958) p. 91

• The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.
  • The Bell (1958), ch. 9; 2001, p. 119.

• We can only learn to love by loving.
  • The Bell (1958), ch. 19; 2001, p. 219.

• Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
  • "The Sublime and the Good", in the Chicago Review, Vol. 13 Issue 3 (Autumn 1959) p. 51.

• Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
  • A Severed Head (1961); 1976, p. 61.

• There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
  • A Severed Head (1961); 1976, p. 181.

• I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
  • The Red and the Green (1965), ch. 2, p. 30.

• Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
  • The Nice and the Good (1968), ch. 14, p. 127.
  • Murdoch attributed this opinion to her character Kate Gray. It was not her own.

• Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.
  • The Nice and the Good (1968), ch. 22.

• People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
  • A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970); 2001, p. 170.

• Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.
  • The Sovereignty of Good (1970) p. 59.

• Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
  • The Black Prince (1973); 2003, p. 10.

• All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
  • The Black Prince (1973); 2003, p. 181.

• Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
  • The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974) p. 37.

• To eat, teeth must meet.
  • The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (1974), p. 66.

• 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 even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
  • The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 76.

• Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
  • The Philosopher's Pupil (1983) p. 165.

• Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.
  • The Good Apprentice (1985), p. 247.

• Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
  • "Art and Eros: A Dialogue about Art", Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986).

• Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
  • The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) p. 248.

• The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
  • Quoted in The Observer September 13, 1987.

• But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
  • The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 43.

• I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
  • The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 322.

• Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
  • The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 509.

• The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
  • The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 532.

• A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
  • Quoted in The Times (6 July 1989).

Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Penguin, 1989

• The only satisfied rationalists today are blinkered scientists or Marxists.
  • Ch. 7, p. 113

• Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)
  • Ch. 8, p. 119

• All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.
  • Ch. 9, p. 127

• The role of philosophy might be said to be to extend and deepen the self-awareness of mankind.
  • Ch. 9, p. 137

• The novel, the novel proper that is, is about people's treatment of each other, and so it is about human values.
  • Ch. 10, p. 138

• We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.
  • Ch. 10, p. 148 (the concluding sentence of the book)

• There’s something in her archness, not a tone I’d normally think to emulate, but there’s something delicious in it. Her people might be murdering and raping but really they’re thinking about what goodness is in the world, bizarre juxtapositions of that kind.
  • Louise Glück Interview (2014)

• Quotable Iris Murdoch (with links)