Iris Murdoch Quotes

Hegel says that Truth is a great word and the thing is greater still. With Dave we never seemed to get past the word.

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.

I feel I’m at the end of something – everything is going to be different – and terrible.

An experience is richest not talked of.

We can only learn to love by loving.

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.

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.

We are all prisoner, but the name of our cure is not freedom.

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.