Iris Murdoch (1919–99,) fully Dame Jean Iris Murdoch, was an Irish-born British novelist and philosopher. The creator of the philosophical love story, she is primarily known for novels that explore complex sexual relationships and the quest for spiritual life.
Born in Dublin to Anglo-Irish parents, Murdoch read classics at Oxford’s Somerville College. After working as a civil servant 1942–44 and as a United Nations administrator 1944–46, she studied philosophy at Cambridge’s Newnham College. From 1948, she taught philosophy for fifteen years at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
Murdoch is best known as a novelist, but her philosophical writings include Sartre, Romantic Rationalist (1953,) The Sovereignty of Good (1970,) and Metaphysics and Morals (1992.)
Murdoch gained full recognition as a novelist with her most exceptional book, The Bell (1958.) She went on to a highly prolific career with such novels as The Sandcastle (1957,) The Sea, A Severed Head (1961,) The Sea (1978; Booker Prize,) The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983,) The Message to the Planet (1989,) and The Green Knight (1993.) Her other writings include the plays A Severed Head (1963,) The Two Arrows (1972,) and Alt and Eros (1980,) and a book of poetry, The Year of the Birds (1978.)
Murdoch had Alzheimer’s disease since 1994; her husband, the literary critic John Bayley, chronicled her struggle with the disease in his biography, Elegy for Iris (1999; film adaptation Iris, 2001.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Iris Murdoch
Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Love, Lovers
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Love
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Humanity
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 facade of his appearance.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Appearance
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Art, Artists
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.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Pride
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth—well, it’s like brown—it’s not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Morals
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Beauty, Judgment
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Love
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Books, Literature
But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Fantasy
Jealousy is the most dreadfully involuntary of all sins.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Jealousy
Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Love
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
—Iris Murdoch
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writing, Writers
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you’re important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Women
Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Happiness
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Goodness
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Survival
Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
—Iris Murdoch
Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Bereavement
In philosophy if you aren’t moving at a snail’s pace you aren’t moving at all.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Science, Philosophy
Anything that consoles is fake.
—Iris Murdoch
I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Religion
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: The Present, Present
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.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Marriage
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.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Religion
Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
—Iris Murdoch
All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Virtues, Virtue
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Science, Eating, Philosophy
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
—Iris Murdoch
Topics: Criticism, Critics
We can only learn to love by loving.
—Iris Murdoch
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