What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.
Interpretation
Great art stimulates the mind and spirit but does not provide comfort or reassurance.
Iris Murdoch suggests that the highest form of artistic expression possesses the ability to provoke thought and inspire action, rather than merely offering solace or emotional comfort. This implies that true artistic greatness lies in its power to challenge viewers, forcing them to confront deeper realities rather than escaping into reassuring fantasies.
In practice
In a discussion about modern art at a gallery opening, you could use this quote to emphasize the provocative nature of the artwork displayed.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs 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.
Dialogue is what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living.
I'm a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film.
Those with prodigious skill in music are better suited for all things.
works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.
For me, the intellect is always the guide but not the goal of the performance. Three things have to be coordinated, and not one must stick out. Not too much intellect because it can become scholastic. Not too much heart because it can become schmaltz. Not too much technique because you become a mechanic.
It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.
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