What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
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.
Interpretation
Words often fail to accurately convey human emotions and truths.
This quote by Iris Murdoch reflects on the inadequacies of language in expressing genuine human feelings and truths. She suggests that while we attempt to articulate emotions, the very process of defining them with words can lead to misinterpretations and falsehoods, leaving us with a sense of futility in communication and a desire to retreat to simpler expressions.
In practice
In a discussion on the complexities of human experiences, you can cite this quote to emphasize the struggle of expressing deep emotions.
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.
Remember God more often than you breathe.
My father's family was mostly obliterated in the Holocaust, and I grew up very much with the sense that the central moral and political question is how do we prevent these things from happening again.
It always amazes me to think that every house on every street is full of so many stories; so many triumphs and tragedies, and all we see are yards and driveways.
Being taught to despise your body is being taught to perhaps admire someone else's body more than yours - being taught that your body is good for certain things and not for others.
And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn't care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He's still going to make these hikes, he'd insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others', and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.
Traditionally, I have responded to the transcendent mystics of all religions. I have always responded with breathless excitement to anyone who has ever said that God does not live in a dogmatic scripture or in a distant throne in the sky, but instead abides very close to us indeed- much closer than we can imagine, breathing right through our own hearts.
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