Iris Murdoch

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

There is no substitute for the comfort supplied by the utterly taken-for-granted relationship.

The priesthood is a marriage. People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is so unlike it that it can hardly be recognized as love at all.

Perhaps misguided moral passion is better than confused indifference.

We can only learn to love by loving.

Falling out of love is very enlightening. For a short while you see the world with new eyes.

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

He was a sociologist; he had got into an intellectual muddle early on in life and never managed to get out.

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

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

Moralistic is not moral. And as for truth - well, it's like brown - it's not in the spectrum. Truth is so generic.

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