We can only learn to love by loving.
IRIS MURDOCHThe 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.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.
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Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
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We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality says Iris Murdoch. But given the state of the world, is it wise?
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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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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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
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We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
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Anything that consoles is fake.
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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
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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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The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.
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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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We 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?
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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






