19 quotes by Iris Murdoch

Feelings
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.
4.0 · 16 votes · 119 reads
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Nature
Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
4.2 · 34 votes · 129 reads
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Nature
I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.
4.0 · 12 votes · 165 reads
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Society
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.
4.6 · 26 votes · 28 reads
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Thought and Reason
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
4.6 · 39 votes · 62 reads
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Art and Culture
Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
4.5 · 35 votes · 13 reads
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Feelings
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
3.7 · 29 votes · 66 reads
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Society
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
3.1 · 30 votes · 133 reads
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Thought and Reason
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
3.7 · 21 votes · 65 reads
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Society
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.
5.0 · 52 votes · 175 reads
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Feelings
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.
3.8 · 56 votes · 3 reads
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Various
There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
3.3 · 41 votes · 141 reads
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Time
We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
3.7 · 54 votes · 84 reads
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Art and Culture
Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
3.8 · 42 votes · 0 reads
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