A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia. Iris Murdoch More Quotes by Iris Murdoch More Quotes From Iris Murdoch Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously. Iris Murdoch serioustakenliterature What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them. Iris Murdoch passiontestslong 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 fantasyjudgingworld The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession. Iris Murdoch pridehurtlife I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped. Iris Murdoch holyworshipmade He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out. Iris Murdoch sociologistsintellectualliterature Language is a machine for making falsehoods. Iris Murdoch machineslanguageinspirational Mathematics is good for the soul, getting things right enlivens a sense of truth, efforts to understand automatically purify desires. Iris Murdoch effortsouldesire You cannot have both truth and what you call civilisation. Iris Murdoch civilisationtruth Oh the piercing sadness of life in the midst of its ordinariness! Iris Murdoch piercingsunhappinesssadness Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate. Iris Murdoch caveshatedarkness It was like hunting fish with an underwater gun, a sport which he had once been foolish enough to try. At one moment there is the fish - graceful, mysterious, desirable and free - and the next moment there is nothing but struggling and blood and confusion. Iris Murdoch gunstrugglesports To be a complete victim may be another source of power. Iris Murdoch victimpowermay People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. Iris Murdoch marriageselfliars The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair. Iris Murdoch childhooddespairchildren ... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead animals into a hole in your face. Then munch, munch, munch. If there's anybody watching, they must be dying of laughter. Iris Murdoch laughterchoicesanimal A death is the most terrible of facts. Iris Murdoch terribledeathfacts Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world. Iris Murdoch eroticlovesex The human soul is not framed for continued proximity, and the result of this enforced neighbourhood is often an appalling loneliness for which the rules of the game forbid assuagement. Iris Murdoch lonelinesssoulgames Trains induce such terrible anxiety. They image the possibility of total and irrevocable failure. They are also dirty, rackety, packed with strangers, an object lesson in the foul contingency of life: the talkative fellow-traveller, the possibility of children. Iris Murdoch anxietychildrendirty
