What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someoneβs company you love them.
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
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 βMan's creative struggle, his search for wisdom and truth, is a love story.
All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream.
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.
Similar quotes
Growing up is something that you do your whole life. I want to always feel that I can be a kid if I want. Growing up has some negative connotations. Like, you're not supposed to roll around on the ground anymore. You're not supposed to make fun of yourself. You're not supposed to ride a bicycle. But I'm a Toys-R-Us kid.
Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
The imagination is the secret and marrow of civilization. It is the very eye of faith.
Western civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet.
I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.
Yes, yes, I see it all! β an enormous social activity, a mighty civilization, a profuseness of science, of art, of industry, of morality, and afterwords, when we have filled the world with industrial marvels, with great factories, with roads, museums and libraries, we shall fall exhausted at the foot of it all, and it will subsist β for whom? Was man made for science or was science made for man?