Iris Murdoch Quotes

Americans seem sometimes to believe that if you are a thinker you must be a frowning bore, because thinking is so damn serious.

I arrived from Harvard, where I had studied philosophy and the history of ideas, with a bias toward literature and formal thought.

I am probably a pseudo-intellectual.

I like the concept of teenagers and philosophy.

Take from the philosopher the pleasure of being heard and his desire for knowledge ceases.

The paradox is really the pathos of intellectual life and just as only great souls are exposed to passions it is only the great thinker who is exposed to what I call paradoxes, which are nothing else than grandiose thoughts in embryo.

My reading of philosophy and history is desultory; I know so much and yet so little.

One cannot be independent of the deep thinking of the people.

Intellectuals are people who manage the world in their head. They look at life and try to see some kind of truth, and if they cannot find it, they attempt to create it.

In fact I'm in too much of a mental muddle to know where I am - an idealist or not. I'm a mere man of letters, and I do what I can with those subjects.

The origin of thinking is some perplexity, confusion or doubt.

I tend to read a lot of books and believe in a certain ideology.

I grew up in this house of intellectuals, and for me, it wasn't, like, a negative thing. And what I've discovered is, for a lot of people, it is. But I think knowing history, liking to talk about ideas - like, I just genuinely like to geek out and go on these intellectual thought journeys.

At graduate school in 1999, I finally had the chance to examine why I believe what I believe. I realised that I'd had no period in my life where I'd consciously tried to develop my own theology.

In general, I agree with Socrates that what democracies badly need is the examined life, and we need to think critically about ourselves.

Sociology is really in trouble as a field. I can tell you, because I've known young people who have wanted to go into it, and they have been uniformly advised, if you are a free thinker, stay away from sociology.

I had to read Plato and Kant, and at times I was overwhelmed. But I have always been fearless, and so was Hannah Arendt. She wasn't afraid to speak out when she knew her opinions would not be popular because she believed in the public discourse above all.

It was a combination of typecasting and my own demons. There are roles I could have gotten, but there were just lots of opportunities that I just blew on my own.

I remember thinking when I was in college that a lot of these known Chomsky-like, verbose, high-lefty thinkers made absolutely no sense, but I thought that was my problem.

Academic studies in general is not something that I'm very good at.

I was never very good at school with... humanities... anything which was more a matter of opinion.

If your own mind is muddled, much more will the minds of your hearers be confused.

To reason, to argue. It is to walk with crutches in search of the truth. We come to it with a leap.

The mind should be accustomed to make wise reflections, and draw curious conclusions as it goes along; the habitude of which made Pliny the Younger affirm that he never read book so bad but he drew some profit from it.

Even if the received opinion be not only true, but the whole truth; unless it is suffered to be, and actually is, vigorously and earnestly contested, it will, by most of those who receive it, be held in the manner of a prejudice, with little comprehension or feeling of its rational grounds