The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Iris Murdoch

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

Life, Great, World

Happiness is a matter of one’s most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

Self, Busy, Matter

The cry of equality pulls everyone down.

Down, Everyone, Cry

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

Love, Love Is, Matter

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

People, Up, Planets

Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

Love Is, Real, Difficult

The most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.

difficult, days

All the time when I speak to you, even now, I’m saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That’s so even between us – and how much more it’s so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one’s so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.

communication, language

Yes, of course, there’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It’s really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like “pass the gravy” is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and… pass the gravy.

It is necessary to write, that much is clear, and to write in a way quite unlike any way which I have employed before.

honesty, self-deception, truth, writers, writing

What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.

failure, stupidity

One forgot, one forgot. What hold had one on the past? The present moment was a little travelling in darkness.