"But fantasy kills imagination, pornography is death to art."

Murdoch, Iris on Fantasy
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"Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end."

Murdoch, Iris on Goodness
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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."

Murdoch, Iris on Happiness
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"Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously."

Murdoch, Iris on Humankind
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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."

Murdoch, Iris on Judgment and Judges
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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."

Murdoch, Iris on Appearance
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"Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions."

Murdoch, Iris on Literature
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"No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base."

Murdoch, Iris on Love
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"Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is."

Murdoch, Iris on Love Ended
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"Every man needs two women, a quiet home-maker, and a thrilling nymph."

Murdoch, Iris on Lovers
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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."

Murdoch, Iris on Marriage
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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."

Murdoch, Iris on Moralists
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"Philosophy! Empty thinking by ignorant conceited men who think they can digest without eating!"

Murdoch, Iris on Philosophers and Philosophy
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"In philosophy if you aren't moving at a snail's pace you aren't moving at all."

Murdoch, Iris on Philosophers and Philosophy
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"Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods."

Murdoch, Iris on Arts and Artists
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"We shall be better prepared for the future if we see how terrible, how doomed the present is."

Murdoch, Iris on Present
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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."

Murdoch, Iris on Pride
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"There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship."

Murdoch, Iris on Relationships
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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."

Murdoch, Iris on Sociology
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"Bereavement is a darkness impenetrable to the imagination of the unbereaved."

Murdoch, Iris on Bereavement
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"Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference."

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

Murdoch, Iris on Survival
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"Possibly, more people kill themselves and others out of hurt vanity than out of envy, jealousy, malice or desire for revenge."

Murdoch, Iris on Vanity
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"All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous."

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

Murdoch, Iris on Women
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"I daresay anything can be made holy by being sincerely worshipped."

Murdoch, Iris on Worship
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"Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck."

Murdoch, Iris on Writers and Writing
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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."

Murdoch, Iris on Churches
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"A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia."

Murdoch, Iris on Critics and Criticism
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