01c. 1959 ADIf even a dog's tooth is truly worshipped it glows with light. The venerated object is endowed with power, that is the simple sense of the ontological proof. And if there is art enough a lie can enlighten us as well as the truth. What is the truth anyway, that truth? As we know ourselves we are fake objects, fakes, bundles of illusions. Can you determine exactly what you felt or thought or did?Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
02c. 1959 ADThe death of God has set the angels free. And they are terrible. There are principalities and powers. Angels are the thoughts of God. Now he had been dissolved into his thoughts which are beyond our conception in their nature and their multiplicity and their power. God was at least the name of something which we thought was good. Now even the name has gone and the spiritual world is scattered. There is nothing any more to prevent the magnetism of many spirits.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
03c. 1959 ADThat's how vile i am! I live Ireland, I breathe Ireland, and Christ how I loathe it, I wish I were a bloody Scot, that's how bloody awful it is being Irish!Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
04c. 1959 ADLove doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--''Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
06c. 1959 ADSartre turns love into a ‘battle between two hypnotists in a closed room’.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADHowever, on one occasion, several years ago, I was idiot enough to take a dose of LSD. (I did it to please a woman.) I had what is known as a 'bad trip'. It was a very bad trip. I shall not attempt to describe what I experienced on that dreadful and rather shameful occasion. (I will only add: it concerned entrails.) In fact it would be extremely hard, even impossible, to put it properly into words. It was something morally, spiritually horrible, as if one's stinking inside had emerged and become the universe: a surging emanation of dark half-formed spiritual evil, something never ever to be escaped from. 'Undetachable,' I remember, was a word which somehow 'came along' with the impression of it. In fact the visual images involved were dreadfully clear and, as it were, authoritative ones and they are rising up in front of me at this moment, and I will not write about them. Of course i never took LSD again.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
08c. 1959 ADBut jealousy is a dreadful thing, Jessica. It is the most natural to us of the really wicked passions and it goes deep and envenoms the soul. It must be resisted with every honest cunning and with the deliberate thinking of generous thoughts, however abstract and empty these may seem in comparison with that wicked strength... There is no merit, Jessica, in a faithfulness which is poison to you and captivity to him.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
09c. 1959 ADWe are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
11c. 1959 ADWe brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
12c. 1959 ADNever seen the sea! How could anyone not have seen the sea? Surely the sea must somehow belong to the happiness of every child.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
13c. 1959 ADGod lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
15c. 1959 ADWe are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
17c. 1959 ADAs we live our precarious lives on the brink of the void, constantly coming closer to a state of nonbeing, we are all too often aware of our fragitlity.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
18c. 1959 ADThe most potent and sacred command which can be laid upon any artist is the command: wait.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
19c. 1959 ADLove is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
20c. 1959 ADPerhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
21c. 1959 ADFalling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
23c. 1959 ADHappiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
24c. 1959 ADWe live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.Iris Murdoch / quote ↗
