Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.
IRIS MURDOCHPerhaps there was an intimacy which did not need words.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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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.
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Every artist is an unhappy lover. And unhappy lovers want to tell their story.
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As we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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We can only learn to love by loving.
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I don’t think I can marry, I’m not fit for it, I’m not real enough. That’s the trouble. I’m a puppet that’s realised what’s wrong with itself and it’s horrible. I’m propped up somewhere all alone, watching the real people go past. I’m propped up crying in a corner.
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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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An experience is richest not talked of.
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People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
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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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Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.
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Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed.
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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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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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Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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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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I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.
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Time, like the sea, unties all knots.
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I took a deep breath, however, and followed my rule of never speaking frankly to women in moments of emotion. No good ever comes of this.
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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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Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
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Anything that consoles is fake.
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One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
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I have nobody in the world. I’ll kill myself. That’s best. Everyone will say, It’s for the best that she killed herself, she’s better off dead. I hate myself so much I could spend hours and hours just screaming with hatred and with the pain of it, oh the pain of it.
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We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.
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Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.
IRIS MURDOCH