Iris Murdoch

Found 13 thoughts of 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.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.