Murdoch, Iris
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Murdoch, Iris
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Murdoch, Iris
Critics and Criticism
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.
Murdoch, Iris
Churches
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
Murdoch, Iris
Causes
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.
Murdoch, Iris
Happiness
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
Murdoch, Iris
Fantasy
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
Murdoch, Iris
Humankind
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.
Murdoch, Iris
Marriage
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Murdoch, Iris
Love Ended
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
Murdoch, Iris
Literature
Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
Murdoch, Iris
Lovers
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Murdoch, Iris
Love
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Murdoch, Iris
Judgment and Judges
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
Murdoch, Iris
Philosophers and Philosophy
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
Murdoch, Iris
Present
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
Murdoch, Iris
Survival
In philosophy if you aren t moving at a snail s pace you aren t moving at all.
Murdoch, Iris
Philosophers and Philosophy
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.
Murdoch, Iris
Pride
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it s like brown -- it s not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
Murdoch, Iris
Moralists
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
Murdoch, Iris
Relationships
He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
Murdoch, Iris
Sociology
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 façade of his appearance.
Murdoch, Iris
Appearance
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
Murdoch, Iris
Goodness
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
Murdoch, Iris
Arts and Artists
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
Murdoch, Iris
Bereavement
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you re important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
Murdoch, Iris
Women
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
Murdoch, Iris
Vanity
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one s luck.
Murdoch, Iris
Writers and Writing
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
Murdoch, Iris
Virtue
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
Murdoch, Iris
Worship