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Date of Birth
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15-July-1919
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Place of Birth
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Phibsborough
(Ireland, County Dublin)
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Nationality
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United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland
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Also know as
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Jean Iris Murdoch, Dame Iris Murdoch
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Profession
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Writer, Novelist, Philosopher, Author
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Quotes
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- Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
- I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
- Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
- Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
- Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
- All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
- 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 agonizing preoccupation with self.
- 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.
- Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
- 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.
- Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
- We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
- Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
- A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
- A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the fa?ade of his appearance.
- Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
- There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
- I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
- Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
- Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
- 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 ever murderous obsession.
- Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
- He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
- Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
- No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
- People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
- The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
- In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
- But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
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Dame Iris Murdoch DBE was an Irish-born British author and philosopher, best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net, was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
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