Iris Murdoch

Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.

The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man.  Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish.  Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.

I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon individual reality.  I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.

We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.

One of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats.

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

We can only learn to love by loving.

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.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn.