Language is a machine for making falsehoods. Iris Murdoch More Quotes by Iris Murdoch More Quotes From Iris Murdoch One should go easy on smashing other people's lies. Better to concentrate on one's own. Iris Murdoch easy lying people All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. Iris Murdoch artist sea dream The very madness of the scheme protects it. Iris Murdoch 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. Iris Murdoch wind-blowing smell doors youth is a marvelous garment Iris Murdoch garments marvelous youth It's easier to sell junk when you're known than works of genius when you're unknown. Iris Murdoch junk easier genius In a happy marriage there is a continuous dense magnetic sense of communication. Iris Murdoch 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. Iris Murdoch 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. Iris Murdoch reading animal happiness No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base. Iris Murdoch frivolous romance love Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story. Iris Murdoch creative struggle men Good writing is full of surprises and novelties, moving in a direction you don't expect. Iris Murdoch 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. Iris Murdoch god mother summer Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating! Iris Murdoch food philosophy science Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do. Iris Murdoch vision hate hatred Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions. Iris Murdoch technique emotion literature Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness. Iris Murdoch 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. Iris Murdoch cozy light art Socrates wrote nothing. Christ wrote nothing. Iris Murdoch 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. Iris Murdoch political views philosophy
