Iris Murdoch (1919 – 1999)
Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher, famed for her series of novels that combine rich characterization and compelling plotlines usually involving ethical or sexual themes.
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.
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.
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
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.
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
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. (The Red and the Green, page 29 )
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.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wave-length of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
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.