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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.

— Iris Murdoch The Nice and the Good (1968)

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More quotes by Iris Murdoch

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970)

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

All metaphysical theories are inconclusively vulnerable to positivist attack.

Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Iris Murdoch (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.