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But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

— Iris Murdoch The Message to the Planet (1989)

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Art

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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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

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.