Iris Murdoch

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.

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

For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

There is a gulf fixed between those who can sleep and those who cannot. It is one of the greatest divisions of the human race.

The theatre is certainly a place for learning about the brevity of human glory: oh all those wonderful glittering absolutely vanished pantomime! Now I shall abjure magic and become a hermit : put myself in a situation where I can honestly say that I have nothing else to do but to learn to be good.

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.

Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder.

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth, pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms, simple and calm and blessed, which we saw once in a pure, clear light, being pure ourselves.

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.

I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.

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

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.