Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for conc... by Iris Murdoch

Art is brief. (Not in a temporal sense.) [...] Words are for concealment. Art is concealment.

Iris Murdoch

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Categorized in : Art Art Is Concealment

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to con... by Iris Murdoch

One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own.

easy lying people

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some cre... by Iris Murdoch

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.

artist sea dream

The very madness of the scheme protects it. by Iris Murdoch

The very madness of the scheme protects it.

schemes madness protect

Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.

wind-blowing smell doors

youth is a marvelous garment by Iris Murdoch

youth is a marvelous garment

garments marvelous youth

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius w... by Iris Murdoch

It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown.

junk easier genius

In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of... by Iris Murdoch

In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication.

dense happy-marriage communication

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

opportunity order art

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too. How fortunate we are to be food-consuming animals. Each meal should be a treat and one ought to bless every day which brings with it a good digestion and the precious gift of hunger.

reading animal happiness

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

frivolous romance love

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a lo... by Iris Murdoch

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

creative struggle men

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a dire... by Iris Murdoch

Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect.

novelty writing moving

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern.

god mother summer

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think th... by Iris Murdoch

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

food philosophy science

Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hat... by Iris Murdoch

Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.

vision hate hatred

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique fo... by Iris Murdoch

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

technique emotion literature

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the... by Iris Murdoch

Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.

darkness love looks

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing. by Iris Murdoch

Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing.

literature christ

We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.

political views philosophy