These quotations from the novels of Iris Murdoch do not do justice to the novels of course, which are wonderful stories with extraordinary descriptions, observations, insights and surprise turns. Nevertheless, her these have an aphoristic depth that is special, all the more so for being placed within the plot of people's lives, as befits an existential view of all thought.

From: Iris Murdoch, Under the Net, 1954

From first to last it was Hugo, not I, who conducted the conversation. He was interested in everything, and interested in the theory of everything, but in a peculiar way. Everything had a theory, and yet there was no master theory. I have never met a man more destitute than Hugo of anything which could be called a metaphysic or general Weltanschauung. It was rather perhaps that of each thing he met he wanted to know the nature – and he seemed to approach this question in each instance with an absolute freshness of mind. The results were often astonishing. I remember a conversation we had once about translating. Hugo knew nothing about translating, but when he learnt that I was a translator he wanted to know what it was like. I remember him going on and on, asking questions such as: what do you mean when you say that you think the meaning in French? If you see a picture in your mind how do you know it’s a French picture? Or is it that you say the French word to yourself? What do you see when you see that the translation is exactly right? Are you imagining what someone else would think, seeing it for the first time? Or is it a kind of feeling? What kind of feeling? Can’t you describe it more closely? And so on and so on, with a fantastic patience. This sometimes became very exasperating. What seemed to me to be the simplest utterance soon became, under the repeated pressure of Hugo’s ‘You mean’, a dark and confused saying of which I no longer myself knew the meaning. The activity of translating, which had seemed the plainest thing in the world, turned out to be an act so complex and extraordinary that it was puzzling to see how any human being could perform it. Yet at the same time Hugo’s inquiries rarely failed to throw an extraordinary amount of light on whatever he concerned himself with. For Hugo each thing was astonishing, delightful, complicated, and mysterious. During these conversations I began to see the whole world anew. During the early part of my discussions with Hugo I kept trying to ‘place’ him. Once or twice I asked him directly whether he held this or that general theory – which he always denied with an air of one who has been affronted by a failure of taste. And indeed it seemed to me later that to ask such questions of Hugo showed a peculiar insensitivity to his unique intellectual and moral quality. After a while I realized that Hugo held no general theories whatsoever. All his theories, if they could be called theories, were particular. But still I had the feeling that if I tried hard enough I could come somehow to the centre of his thought; and after a while my passion became to discuss with Hugo not so much politics or art or sex, but what it was that was so peculiar in Hugo’s approach to politics or art or sex. At last we did seem to have a conversation which seemed to me to touch on something central to Hugo’s thought, if Hugo’s thought could be said at all to have anything so figurative as a centre. He himself would probably have denied this; or rather, I’m not sure that he would have known what it meant for thoughts to have an orientation. We arrived at the point in question by way of a discussion about Proust. From Proust we were led on to discuss what it meant to describe a feeling or state of mind. Hugo found this very puzzling, as indeed he found everything very puzzling. ‘There’s something fishy about describing people’s feelings,’ said Hugo. ‘All these descriptions are so dramatic.’ ‘What’s wrong with that?’ I said. ‘Only,’ said Hugo, ‘that it means that things are falsified from the start. If I say afterwards that I felt such and such, say that I felt “apprehensive” – well, this just isn’t true.’ ‘What do you mean?’I asked. ‘I don’t feel this,’ said Hugo, ‘I didn’t feel anything of that kind at the time at all. This is just something I say afterwards.’ ‘But suppose I try hard to be accurate,’ I said. ‘One can’t be,’ said Hugo. ‘The only hope is to avoid saying it. As soon as I start to describe, I’m done for. Try describing anything, our conversation for instance, and see how absolutely instinctively you…’ ‘Touch it up?’ I suggested. ‘It’s deeper than that,’ said Hugo. ‘The language just won’t let you present it as it really was.’ ‘Suppose the,’ I said, ‘that one were offering the description at the time.’ ‘But don’t you see,’ said Hugo, ‘that just gives the thing away. One couldn’t give such a description at the time without seeing that it was untrue. All one could say at the time would be perhaps something about one’s heart beating. But if one said one was apprehensive this could only be to try to make an impression – it would be for effect, it would be a lie.’ […] ‘Of course one does talk. But, […] one does make far too many concessions to the need to communicate.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘All the time when I speak to you, even now, I’m saying not precisely what I think, but what will impress you and make you respond. That’s so even between us – and how much more it’s so where there are stronger motives for deception. In fact, one’s so used to this one hardly sees it. The whole language is a machine for making falsehoods.’ ‘What would happen if you were to speak the truth? ‘I asked. ‘Would it be possible?’ ‘I know myself,’ said Hugo, ‘that when I really speak the truth the words fall from my mouth absolutely dead, and I see complete blankness in the face of the other person.’ ‘So we never really communicate?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose actions don’t lie.’

T: But ideas are like money. There must be an accepted coin which circulates . Concepts which are used for communication are justified by success.

A: That’s near to saying that a story is true if enough people believe it.

T: Of course I don’t mean that. If I use an analogy or invent a concept part of what must be tested when the success is tested is whether by this means I can draw attention to real things in the world. Any concept can be misused. Any sentence can state a falsehood. But words themselves don’t tell lies. A concept may have limitations but won’t mislead if I expose them in my use of it.

A: Yes, that’s the grand style of lying. Put down you best half truth and call it a lie, but let it stand all the same. It will survive when your qualifications have been forgotten, even by yourself.

T: But life has to be lived, and to be lived it has to be understood. This process is called civilisation. What you say goes against our very nature. We are rational animals in the sense of theory-making animals.

A: When you’ve been most warmly involved in life, when you’ve most felt yourself a man, has a theory ever helped you? Is it not then that you meet with things themselves naked? Has a theory helped you when you were in doubt about what to do? Are not these simple moments when theories are shilly shallying? And don’t you realize this clearly at such moments?

T: My answer is twofold. Firstly that I may not reflect upon theories, but I may be expressing one all the same. Secondly that there are theories abroad in the world, political ones for instance, and so we have to deal with them in our thoughts, and that at moments of decision too.

A: If by expressing a theory you mean that someone else could make a theory about what you do, of course that is true and uninteresting. What I speak of is the real decision as we experience it; and here the movement away from theory and generality is the movement toward truth. All theorizing is flight. We must be ruled by the situation itself and this is unutterably particular. Indeed it is something to which we can never get close enough, however hard we may try as it were to crawl under the net.

T: That may be. But what about my other point?

A: It is true that theories may often be a part of a situation that one has to contend with. Bu then all sorts of obvious lies and fantasies may be a part of such a situation; and you would say that one must be good a t detecting and shunning lies, and not that one must be good at lying.

T: So you would cut all speech, except the very simplest, out of human life altogether. To do this would be to take away our very means of understanding ourselves and making life endurable.

A: Wht should life be made endurable? I know that nothing consoles and nothing justifies except a story – but that doesn’t stop all stories from being lies. Only the greatest men can speak and still be truthful. Any artist knows this obscurely; he knows that a theory is death, and that all expression is weighted with theory. Only the strongest can rise against that weight. For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine. This was something the ancients understood. Psyche was told that if she spoke about her pregnancy her child would be a mortal; if she kept silent it would be a god. [jctv: isn’t that a story?]

There is something compelling about the sound of a fountain in a deserted place. It murmurs about what things do when no one watches them. It is the hearing of an unheard sound. A gentle refutation of Berkeley.

I stood there for a long time, leaning against a marble urn and meditating upon the curve of her thigh. How her right leg is drawn under her, and her naked left leg outstretched in that pure undulation which can lift contemplation and desire almost together to the highest point of awareness, the curve of a reclining woman’s thigh.

‘Some situations can’t be unravelled’, said Hugo, ‘they just have to be dropped. The trouble with you Jake, is that you want to understand everything sympathetically. It can’t be done. One must just blunder on. Truth lies in blundering on.’

God is a task. God is detail. It all lies close to your hand.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

London sped past me, beloved city, almost invisible in it familiarity.

Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

From: Iris Murdoch, The Bell, 1958

That was marriage, thought Dora; to be enclosed in the aims of another.

Well, don't let's start on Paul, 'said Noel. 'But about those religious folk. Don't let them give you a bad conscience. People like that adore having a sense of sin and living in an atmosphere of emotion and self-abasement. You must be a great catch. The penitent wife and so forth. But don't give into them. Never forget, my darling, that what they believe just isn't true.' 'You're drinking my drink!' said Dora. 'No, I suppose it isn't true. But there is something decent about them all the same.' 'They may be nice, 'said Noel, 'but they're thoroughly misguided. No good comes in the end of untrue beliefs. There is no God and there is no judgment, except the judgment that each one of us makes for himself; and what that is is a private matter. Sometimes of course one has to interfere with people to stop them doing things one dislikes. But for Christ's sake let their minds alone. I can't stand complacent swine who go around judging other people and making them feel cheap. If they want to wallow in their sense of unworthiness, let them; but when they interfere with their neighbours one ought positively to fight them!' 'You sound quite passionate!' said Dora. 'Pass me the towel.'

Dora hadn't especially intended to visit the National Gallery, but once she was there she went in. It was as good a place as any other to decide what to do. She no longer wanted any lunch. She wondered if she should try phoning Sally again; but she no longer wanted to see Sally. She climbed the stairs and wandered away into the eternal spring-time of the air-conditioned rooms. Dora had been in the National Gallery a thousand time and the pictures were almost as familiar to her as her own face. Passing between them now, as through a well-loved grove, she felt a calm descending on her. She wandered a little, watching with compassion the poor visitors armed with guide books who were peering anxiously at the masterpieces. Dora did not need to peer. She could look, as one can at last when one knows a great thing very well, confronting it with a dignity which it has itself conferred. She felt that the pictures belonged to her, and reflected ruefully that they were about the only thing that did. Vaguely consoled by the presence of something welcoming and responding in the place, her footsteps took her to various shrines at which she had worshipped so often before; the great light spaces of Italian pictures, more vast and southern than any real South, the angels of Botticelli, radiant as birds, delighted as gods, and curling like the tendrils of a vine, the glorious carnal presence of Susanna Fourment, the tragic presence of Margarethe Trip, the solemn world of Piero della Francesca with its early morning colours, the enclosed an gilded world of Crivelli. Dora stopped at last in front of Gainsborough's picture of his two daughters. These children step through a wood hand in hand, their garments shimmering, their eyes serious and dark, their two pale heads, round full buds, like yet unlike. Dora was always moved by the pictures. Today she was moved, but in a new way. She marvelled, with a kind of gratitude, that they were all still here, and her heart was filled with love for the pictures, their authority, their marvellous generosity, their splendour. It occurred to her that here was something real and something perfect. Who had said that, about perfection and reality being in the same place? Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it part of her fantasy make it worthless. Even Paul, she thought, only existed no as someone she dreamt about; or else as a vague external menace never really encountered and understood. But the pictures were something real outside herself, which spoke to her kindly and yet in sovereign tones, something superior and good whose presence destroyed the dreary trance-like solipsism of her earlier mood. When the world had seemed subjective it had seemed to be without interest or value. But now there was something else in it after all. These thoughts, not clearly articulated, flitted through Dora's mind. She had never thought about the pictures in this way before; nor did she draw now any very explicit moral. Yet she felt that she had had a revelation. She looked at the radiant, sombre, tender, powerful canvas of Gainsborough and felt a sudden desire to go down on her knees before it, embracing it, shedding tears. Dora looked anxiously about her, wondering if anyone had noticed her transports. Although she had not actually prostrated herself, her face must have looked unusually ecstatic, and the tears were in fact sarting into her eyes. She found that she was alone in the room, and smiled, restored to a more calm enjoyment of her wisdom. She gave a last look at the painting, still smiling, as one might smile in a temple, favoured, encouraged and loved. The she turned and began to leave the building. Dora was hurrying now and wanting her lunch. She looked at her watch and found it was tea-time. She remembered that she had been wondering what to do; but now without her thinking about it, it had become obvious. She must go back to Imber at once. Her real life, her real problems, were at Imber; and since, somewhere, something good existed, it might be that her problems would be solved after all. There was a connexion; obscurely she felt, without yet understanding it, she must hang onto that idea: there was a connexion. She bought a sandwich and took a taxi back to Paddington. 'The chief requirement of the good life,' said Michael, 'is that one should have some conception of one's capacities. One must know oneself sufficiently to know what is the next thing. One must study carefully how best to use such strength as one has.' The mechanical details of the plan [to recover the old bell from the lake by night and substitute it for the new bell as a surprise for the community and the abbey] aroused in Toby a sort of ecstasy. It was all so difficult and yet so exquisitely possible and he brooded over it as over a work of art.