Iris Murdoch quotes

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

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

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.

Between saying and doing, many a pair of shoes is worn out.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

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

Every man needs two women: a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.