What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The bicycle represents a simple, pure, and civilized means of transportation compared to other increasingly complex and problematic forms of travel.
This quote by Iris Murdoch suggests that the bicycle epitomizes a form of transport that is straightforward, unencumbered by the complications and stresses associated with modern vehicles. In a world where other means of transport often become 'nightmarish' due to congestion, pollution, and technological dependence, the bicycle stands out as a symbol of purity and simplicity, offering a more humane and thoughtful way to move about.
Themes
BicycleTransportationCivilizationPurityFreedom
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used during a cycling event to emphasize the positive aspects of biking.
More from Iris Murdoch
All quotes →Man's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
Iris MurdochRead
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
Iris MurdochRead
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Iris MurdochRead
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
Iris MurdochRead
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.
Iris MurdochRead
Similar quotes
A race preserves its vigor so long as it harbors a real contrast between what has been and what may be; and so long as it is nerved by the vigor to adventure beyond the safeties of the past. Without adventure civilization is in full decay.
Alfred North WhiteheadRead
A chair is the first thing you need when you don’t really need anything, and is therefore a peculiarly compelling symbol of civilization. For it is civilization, not survival, that requires design.
Ralph CaplanRead
Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.
Marilynne RobinsonRead
If we wish our civilization to survive we must break with the habit of deference to great men.
Karl PopperRead
The Second World War is the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world's seven continents and all it oceans. It killed 50 million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.
John KeeganRead
We say that slavery has vanished from European civilization, but this is not true. Slavery still exists, but now it applies only to women and its name is prostitution.
Victor HugoRead