Verified Quotes
Every quote on this page is verified against the named source work.
Iris Murdoch, Irish-born philosopher and novelist who argued that morality lives in the quality of our attention, not in, gets quoted everywhere and sourced almost nowhere. The 5 quotes below are different: each one is checked word for word against the cited work, starting with The Sovereignty of Good, not copied from aggregator sites that pass misattributions along. The source is named under every line, so you can trace each quote back to the page it came from.
Read Iris Murdoch's full profile and how they reason →4 verified quotes
On really seeing the person you love instead of the story you've written about them:
Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good
On becoming the person you keep pretending to be:
Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself and then comes to resemble the picture.Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good
On why the right choice takes moral effort not just good intentions:
I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of 'see' which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good
On refusing easy comfort after a loss:
Almost anything that consoles us is a fake.Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good
1 verified quote
On keeping a demanding job survivable:
One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea