“ 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- Copy
- 173
“ 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- Copy
- 2.4K
“ Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 500
“ Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 3.5K
“ I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 2.8K
“ He looked so sad. I never saw him look sad before, he was always so superior, everywhere the king. You once called him a god from elsewhere who had lost his way. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 3.9K
“ 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. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 1.6K
“ 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. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 2.6K
“ Happiness. What's that? I don't know. How can one be happy when one loves a demon? ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 754
“ Ludens felt again that special curious anguish caused by glimpses of a happiness he would have felt if only things were different — which could be different, perhaps could easily be different — but somehow maddeningly were not. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 3.5K
“ She tasted for the first time honeysweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 1.3K
“ Happiness must exist. It can't all be made of pain. But what is happiness made of? ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 335
“ Terrible sadness, dread, an agonizing desire for happiness swelled in his heart. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 1.3K
“ One can't whistle up happiness. It's a gift of nature and I haven't got it. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 2.5K
“ I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we so poorly attempt. Often we do not achieve for others the good that we intend but achieve something, something that goes on from our effort. Good is an overflow. Where we generously and sincerely intend it, we are engaged in a work of creation which may be mysterious even to ourselves and because it is mysterious we may be afraid of it. But this should not make us draw back. God can always show us, if we will, a higher and a better way; and we can only learn to love by loving. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Imperfect love must not be condemned and rejected but made perfect. The way is always forward, never back. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 3.8K
“ The same virtues, in the end, the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person. An increasing awareness of 'goods' and the attempt (usually only partially successful) to attend to them purely, without self, brings with it an increasing awareness of the unity and interdependence of the moral world. Oneseeking intelligence is the image of faith. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 1.7K
“ There is a kind of despair involved in creation which I am sure any artist knows all about. In art, as in morality, great things go by the board because at the crucial moment we blink our eyes. When is the crucial moment? Greatness is to recognize it and be able to hold it and to extend it. But for most of us the space between 'dreaming on things to come' and 'it is too late, it is all over' is too tiny to enter. And so we let each thing go, thinking vaguely that it will always be given to us to try again. Thus works of art, and thus whole lives of men, are spoilt by blinking and moving quickly on. I often found that I had ideas for stories, but by the time I had thought them out in detail they seemed to me hardly worth writing, as if I had already 'done' them: not because they were bad, but because they already belonged to the past and I had lost interest. My thoughts were soon stale to me. Some things I ruined by starting them too soon. Others by thinking them so intensely in my head that they were over before they began. Projects would change in a second from hazy uncommitted dreams into unsalvageable ancient history. Whole novels existed only in their titles. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 2.8K
“ Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
“ Dora was stunned by this information. She stopped. 'Do you mean' she said, 'that they're completely imprisoned in there?' Mrs. Marks laughed. 'Not imprisoned, my dear,' she said. 'They are there of their own free will. This is not a prison. It is on the contrary a place which it is very hard to get into, and only the strongest achieve it. Like Mary in the parable, they have chosen the better part. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 1.2K
“ There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 3.7K
“ By a dialectic well known to those who habitually succumb to temptation he passed in a second from the time when it was too early to struggle to the time when it was too late to struggle. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 2.1K
“ 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. ”
- Iris Murdoch- Copy
- 1.7K
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