““Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”

 

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

 

““If you don’t stand for something you will fall for anything.”

 

“One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world—your little carved-out sphere—is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart.. And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That’s when you realize that most of it—life, the relentless mechanism of existing—isn’t about you. It doesn’t include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you’ve jumped the edge. Even after you’re dead.”

 

“There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

 

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”

 

“The majority of people dismiss those things that lie beyond the bounds of their own understanding as absurd and not worth thinking about.”

 

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

 

“My witness is the empty sky.”

 

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

 

“The glory of friendship is not the outstretched hand, not the kindly smile, nor the joy of companionship; it is the spiritual inspiration that comes to one when you discover that someone else believes in you and is willing to trust you with a friendship.”

 

“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” 

 

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

 

“The experience that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing is fundamentally a lie — the truth lies outside in what we do.”

 

“Consciousness is the act of making connections.”

 

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

 

“The moral life itself is when the act of resistance defines identity.”

 

“How we make choices . . . is deeply connected to states of consciousness, and so “anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.” Murdoch then specifies the single best or most “obvious thing in our surroundings which is an occasion for ‘unselfing’ and that is what is popularly called beauty.”