Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch
Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBEwas an Irish novelist 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. Her books include The Bell, A Severed Head, The Red and the Green,...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth15 July 1919
CountryIreland
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats, and if some of these can be inexpensive and quickly procured so much the better.
The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
Love is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and the passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.
The chief requirement of the good life, is to live without any image of oneself.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continous small treats.
We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.
No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
Dogs are very different from cats in that they can be images of human virtue. They are like us.
Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
We defend ourself with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing
There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern...
All our failures are ultimately failures in love.