Skip to content

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.

— Iris Murdoch The Philosopher's Pupil (1983)

Another quote →

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)

All Iris Murdoch quotes →

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.