It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do.

— Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Quotes

It is evening. The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.

— Iris Murdoch

Tenderness and absolute trust and communication and truth matter more and more as one grows older. Somehow let us not waste love, it is rare. Can we not love each other at last in freedom, without awful possessiveness and violence and fear? Love matters, not ‘in love’. Let there be no more partings now. Let there be peace between us now forever, we are no longer young. Love me, love me enough.

— Iris Murdoch

The conversation in the Old Brompton Road was more like an experience of the inferno, but lovers are accustomed to fire.

— Iris Murdoch

There were many people, she said, and Michael was but too ready to credit her since 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.

— Iris Murdoch

It’s just one of the wonders of the world.

— Iris Murdoch

People may be settled into ways of life which preclude continued happiness, but which are satisfactory and far to be preferred to alternatives.

— Iris Murdoch

Hand in hand the children began to run homeward through the soft warm drizzle.

— Iris Murdoch

The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silence that rests open-eyed.

— Iris Murdoch

One reward of living in hell is a certain kind of courage. I do not fear anything, certainly not morality, or your foul fantasies either.

— Iris Murdoch

Love, yes. But sometimes love must sacrifice itself in order to remain love.

— Iris Murdoch

I can browse indefinitely in a stationer’s shop, indeed there is hardly anything in a good stationer’s which I do not like and want.

— Iris Murdoch

The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it.

— Iris Murdoch

Sham dead,’ I said. ‘Dead! Dead dog!’ I hoped that this word was in his vocabulary. It was. In a moment Mars’s legs sagged and his body became limp and he slid to the ground, his eyes turning back and his mouth hanging open. It was terribly convincing. I was quite upset.

— Iris Murdoch

I want to have things clear,’ I said. ‘You’re offering me a sinecure.’ ‘I’m not sure what that is,’ said Madge, ‘but I expect it’s that.’ ‘A sinecure is when you get money for doing nothing,’ I said. ‘But isn’t that exactly what you’ve always wanted?’ said Madge.

— Iris Murdoch

There is something compelling about the sound of a fountain in a deserted place. It murmurs about what things do when no one watches them. It is the hearing of an unheard sound.

— Iris Murdoch

Why did I lie. Well, why should I tell the truth, such a truth, to anyone who asks? Why should I wear such a story always round my neck and be such a figure to the world? And oh, there were worse things, worse than she said. I did not want to be a tragic man, to be the suffering one. I wanted to be light, to be new, to be free–.

— Iris Murdoch

To find a person inexhaustible is simply the definition of love.

— Iris Murdoch

All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

— Iris Murdoch

Guilt is one way of attaching a meaning to a death. We want to find a meaning. It lessens the pain.

— Iris Murdoch

The mysterious awful changes which alter the human face from youth to age may gently dally and delay, then act decisively all at once.

— Iris Murdoch
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