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Appearance
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A good man often appears gauche simply because he does not take advantage of the myriad mean little chances of making himself look stylish. Preferring truth to form, he is not constantly at work upon the fa?ade of his appearance.
-Iris Murdoch
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Art
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Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.
-Iris Murdoch
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Authors & Writing
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Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
-Iris Murdoch
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Books
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Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.
-Iris Murdoch
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Criticism
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A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
-Iris Murdoch
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Fantasy
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But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art.
-Iris Murdoch
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Goodness
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Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
-Iris Murdoch
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Grief, Grieving
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Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved.
-Iris Murdoch
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Happiness
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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
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Humanity
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Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.
-Iris Murdoch
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Judging, Judgment
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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
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Love
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No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.
-Iris Murdoch
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Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.
-Iris Murdoch
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Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph.
-Iris Murdoch
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Marriage
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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
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Morals
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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
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People
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He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.
-Iris Murdoch
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Philosophy
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Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!
-Iris Murdoch
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In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all.
-Iris Murdoch
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Present, the
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We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is.
-Iris Murdoch
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Pride
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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
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Reason
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Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.
-Iris Murdoch
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Relationships
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There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.
-Iris Murdoch
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Religion
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I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped.
-Iris Murdoch
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The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.
-Iris Murdoch
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Books by and about Iris Murdoch