We can only learn to love by loving.
IRIS MURDOCHEvery man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.
IRIS MURDOCH -
I’ve been so unhappy for years, so unhappy, I don’t understand how a human being can be so unhappy all the time and still be alive.
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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.
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This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.
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I think being a woman is like being Irish, Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the time.
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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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Emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. This is why all the world is a stage.
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What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
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Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.
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There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present.
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Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
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Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.
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The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
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Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
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Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
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One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
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Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that’s why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that’s what I am experiencing right now.
IRIS MURDOCH -
To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare’s, the Cornish sea.
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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
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Anything that consoles is fake.
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What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
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Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.
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Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.
IRIS MURDOCH