Iris Murdoch Quotes

We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

—No niegas que hay una causalidad… —dijo Morgan que estaba decidida a no enfadarse con él. Pero deseaba de todo corazón que se marchara.Julius se sentó en uno de los sillones, quitó un cojín y se puso...

He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.

An experience is richest not talked of.

Existentialism, in both its Continental and its Anglo-Saxon versions, is an attempt to solve the problem without really facing it: to solve it by attributing to the individual an empty, lonely freedom...

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.

The painter and the writer are not just copyists or even illusionists, but through some deeper vision of their subject-matter may become privileged truth tellers.

Today there is a pleasant very light haze over the whole sky, and the sea has a misleadingly docile silvered look, as if the substantial wavelets were determined to stroke the rocks as hard as they co...

Εγώ δεν μπορώ να καταλάβω πως είναι δυνατό να είναι κανείς καλλιτέχνης και να μην προσπαθεί συνεχώς να γίνει τέλειος.

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.

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

Bradley, I wish I’d understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet.Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he’s so divine but because he’s so human. Even great art is jumb...

But it was just luck really if the girls survived. You're like a man firing a machine gun into a supermarket who happens not to become a murderer.

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

Tal como nos conocemos, somos objetos falsos, imposturas, ramilletes de ilusionesLos juicios sobre las personas no son jamás decisivos, surgen de resúmenes que inmediatamente hacen pensar en la necesi...

The death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our c...

The painter copies this bed from one point of view. He is thus at three removes from reality. He does not understand the bed, he does not measure it, he could not make it.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

But thinking about wickedness usually just comforts.