Iris Murdoch

One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.

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

We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.

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

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

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

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.

I see myself as Rhoda, not Mary Tyler Moore.

Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!

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

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

Only lies and evil come from letting people off.

In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.

Anything that consoles is fake.

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

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

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.