God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

— Iris Murdoch

Happiness is a matter of one's most ordinary and everyday mode of consciousness being busy and lively and unconcerned with self.

— Iris Murdoch

He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the admitted traitor, the one destined for judgment.

— Iris Murdoch

However, life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.

— Iris Murdoch

However, 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

I am in favor of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theater apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.

— Iris Murdoch

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious to my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important

— Iris Murdoch

I feel half faded away like some figure in the background of an old picture.

— Iris Murdoch

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

— Iris Murdoch

If even a dog's tooth is truly worshiped 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