“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”
— Iris Murdoch
“We can only learn to love by loving.”
— Iris Murdoch
“Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.”
— Iris Murdoch
“Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love.”
— Iris Murdoch
“What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone's company you love them.”
— Iris Murdoch
“Love is the last and secret name of all the virtues.”
— Iris Murdoch
“No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base.”
— Iris Murdoch
“True love gallops, it flies, it is the swiftest of all modes of thought, swifter even than hate and fear.”
— Iris Murdoch
“Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.”
— Iris Murdoch
“Only love has clear vision. Hatred has cloudy vision. When we hate we know not what we do.”
— Iris Murdoch
“Love can't always do work. Sometimes it just has to look into the darkness.”
— Iris Murdoch
“We need a moral philosophy which can speak significantly of Freud and Marx and out of which aesthetic and political views can be generated. We need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now, can once again be made central.”
— Iris Murdoch