One should go easy on smashing other people’s lies. Better to concentrate on one’s own.
IRIS MURDOCHOne of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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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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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
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We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
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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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Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
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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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Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
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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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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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What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.
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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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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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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.
IRIS MURDOCH