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Iris Murdoch Quotes

1919–1999 Ireland

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999) was an Anglo-Irish novelist and philosopher, famed for her series of novels that combine rich characterization and compelling plotlines usually involving ethical or sexual themes. Her life-story was filmed in 2001 as Iris.

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Random Iris Murdoch quote

33 quotes

Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.

I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

The Red and the Green (1965)

All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

The Black Prince (1973)

Whit Meynell was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

The Philosopher's Pupil (1983)

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonising preoccupation with self.

The Nice and the Good (1968)

The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.

The Bell (1958)

Stuart was not dismayed by his sexual feelings about the boy.

The Good Apprentice (1985)

We know that the real lesson to be taught is that the human person is precious and unique; but we seem unable to set it forth except in terms of ideology and abstraction.

Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)

We can only learn to love by loving.

The Bell (1958)

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 even murderous obsession. Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

The Philosopher's Pupil (1983)

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)

Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)

The Book and the Brotherhood (1987) p. 248.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

Misattributed

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Iris Murdoch (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.