Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.
IRIS MURDOCHOf course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.
More Iris Murdoch Quotes
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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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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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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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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.
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We can only learn to love by loving.
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Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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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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Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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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.
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This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.
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We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.
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Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
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Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
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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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Coffee, unless it is very good and made by somebody else, is pretty intolerable at any time.
IRIS MURDOCH