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.
IRIS MURDOCHWe are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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I’ve felt as if I didn’t exist, as if I were invisible, miles away from the world, miles away. You can’t imagine how much alone I’ve been all my life.
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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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Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.
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Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
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This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.
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Our actions are like ships which we may watch set out to sea, and not know when or with what cargo they will return to port.
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I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.
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In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
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Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.
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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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Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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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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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
IRIS MURDOCH






