He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Sociology]

The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Survival]

Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Vanity]

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Virtue]

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Philosophers and Philosophy]

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
~ Iris Murdoch - [Philosophers and Philosophy]

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Present]

The sin of pride may be a small or a great thing in someone's life, and hurt vanity a passing pinprick, or a self-destroying or ever murderous obsession.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Pride]

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Relationships]

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 - [Judgment and Judges]

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Literature]

No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Love]

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Love Ended]

Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Lovers]

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Marriage]

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth -- well, it's like brown -- it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Moralists]

But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Fantasy]

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Goodness]

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self. To be damned is for one's ordinary everyday mode of consciousness to be unremitting agonizing preoccupation with self.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Happiness]

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
~ Iris Murdoch - [Humankind]