A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

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

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

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

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

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 Quote

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

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 Quote

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

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 Quote

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

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
- Iris Murdoch Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
- Iris Murdoch Quote