Yes, of course, there's something fishy about describing people's feelings. You try hard to be accurate, but as soon as you start to define such and such a feeling, language lets you down. It's really a machine for making falsehoods. When we really speak the truth, words are insufficient. Almost everything except things like "pass the gravy" is a lie of a sort. And that being the case, I shall shut up. Oh, and.. pass the gravy. Iris Murdoch
Some Similar Quotes
  1. The menu is not the meal. - Alan W. Watts
  2. Words are the clothes thoughts wear. - Samuel Beckett
  3. When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world. - George Steiner
  4. Philosophy, as we use the word, is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
  5. Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable. - Unknown
More Quotes By Iris Murdoch
  1. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.
  2. Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one's luck.
  3. I know how much you grieve over those who are under your care: those you try to help and fail, those you cannot help. Have faith in God and remember that He will is His own way and in His own time complete what we...
  4. Education doesn’t make you happy. Nor does freedom. We don’t become happy just because we’re free — if we are. Or because we’ve been educated — if we have. <span style="margin:15px; display:block"></span>But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy....
  5. 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.
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