A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
– Iris Murdoch
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
– Iris Murdoch
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
– Iris Murdoch
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
– Iris Murdoch
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
– Iris Murdoch
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
– Iris Murdoch
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
– Iris Murdoch
Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
– Iris Murdoch
Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
– Iris Murdoch
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
– Iris Murdoch
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
– Iris Murdoch
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
– Iris Murdoch
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
– Iris Murdoch
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
– Iris Murdoch
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
– Iris Murdoch
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
– Iris Murdoch
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
– Iris Murdoch
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
– Iris Murdoch
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
– Iris Murdoch
The cry of equality pulls everyone down.
– Iris Murdoch
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
– Iris Murdoch
The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
– Iris Murdoch
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.
– Iris Murdoch
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
– Iris Murdoch
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
– Iris Murdoch
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
– Iris Murdoch
We can only learn to love by loving.
– Iris Murdoch
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.
– Iris Murdoch
In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.
– Iris Murdoch
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
– Iris Murdoch
Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.