Quotes by Iris Murdoch

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.

One doesnt have to get anywhere in a marriage. Its not a public conveyance.

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

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

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

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

“So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.”

“Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free – if we are. Or because we’ve been educated – if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears, tells us where delights are lurking, convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever, that of the mind, and gives us the assurance – the confidence – to walk the path our mind, our educated mind, offers.”

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

“Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.”