What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.
Iris MurdochRead
People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the beauty of flowers and how their presence brings joy to our lives.
Iris Murdoch's quote highlights the profound effect that beauty and nature, represented by flowers, can have on human emotions. It suggests that those unfamiliar with such beauty might perceive our joy as madness, emphasizing how essential these elements of nature are to our happiness and well-being.
In practice
Use this quote in a speech about the importance of nature in our lives.
What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s 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.
Man'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.
It was my father's hope, and it is ours, that the National Gallery would become not a static but a living institution, growing in usefulness and importance to artists, scholars and the general public.
We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race.
Retire? I'm going to stay in show business until I'm the only one left
One good song with a message can bring a point more deeply to more people than a thousand rallies.
I get good references from a wide range of music. Something who's been a good influence in the last few years is Qawwali music. If you listen to a Qawwali singer like Aziz Mian - he's like James Brown. Qawwali is like Pakistani gospel-jazz. It's emotional, but it's also improvised, and it's all about that sacred-and-profane tightrope.
What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.
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