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This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.

Iris Murdoch

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.
IRIS MURDOCH

Fade Feeling Myself Old Photograph
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Goodness Honesty Human Learning Magic Place Wonderful
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
IRIS MURDOCH

Civilization Growth Heart Man Transportation
Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
IRIS MURDOCH

Man Need Quiet Relationship Woman
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
IRIS MURDOCH

Crime Sin Spiritual
There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.
IRIS MURDOCH

Greatness Human Race
We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.
IRIS MURDOCH

Deep Freedom Philosophy Prison
Freedom may be a value in politics, but it is not a value in morals.
IRIS MURDOCH

Freedom Moral Politics Value
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Escape Life Love Talk Value
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Death Live Moments Spirit Time
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

Lose Person Photograph Poem Sea
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
IRIS MURDOCH

Beautiful Break Up Fall Forget Love
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?
IRIS MURDOCH

Fantasy Guilty Judgement Ourselves Sin World
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
IRIS MURDOCH

Art Greatness
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.
IRIS MURDOCH

Live Ourselves Philosophy
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
IRIS MURDOCH

Book Ideas Perfection

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.

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This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.

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