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
In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.
Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.
I think philosophy is extremely good training for anyone who wants to do anything. Although that is an idea which people may speak scornfully of now, I think it does teach one to
Learning philosophy is learning a particular kind of intuitive understanding.
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.
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats
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.
I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.