Iris Murdoch Quotes on Virtue
Iris Murdoch's Sovereignty of Good (1970) gave the post-Anscombe revival of virtue ethics one of its most influential statements. Against the prevailing Oxford emphasis on choice and the language of moral judgment, Murdoch focused attention on the inner life of attention and perception — the patient and disciplined effort by which the morally serious person comes to see persons and situations as they truly are, in defiance of the projecting fantasies and self-interested distortions through which the egoistic self ordinarily encounters the world. The framework draws on Plato (the Form of the Good as the magnetic attractor of moral attention) and Simone Weil (attention as the essential moral capacity), and is developed in the philosophical novels and the late Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992).
Quotes
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Attributed to Iris Murdoch:
“Love is the perception of individuals.”
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“We can only learn to love by loving.”
The Bell (1958), ch. 19; 2001, p. 219. -
“Anything that consoles is fake.”
The Sovereignty of Good (1970) p. 59. -
Attributed to Iris Murdoch:
“The love of God is moral and not mystical.”
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“The chief requirement of the good life... is to live without any image of oneself.”
The Bell (1958), ch. 9; 2001, p. 119. -
“Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.)”
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist(1953) | Ch. 8, p. 119 -
“All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.”
The Black Prince (1973); 2003, p. 181. -
“Murdoch attributed this opinion to her character Kate Gray. It was not her own.”
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