Sommer-Jade

“We use our imagination not to escape the world, but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“I have spoken of efforts of attention directed upon individuals, and of obedience to reality as an exercise of love, and have suggested that reality and individual present themselves to us in moral contexts as ideal endpoints or ideas of reason. This surely is the place where the concept of good lives. Good, real, love — these words are closely connected.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“Love is the general name of the quality of attachment, and it is capable of infinite degradation and is the source of our greatest errors. But when it is even partially refined, it is the energy and passion of the soul in its search for good, the force that joins us to good, and joins us to the world through good. Only rarely does one meet somebody in whom it positively shines, in whom one apprehends with amazement the absence of the anxious, avaricious tentacles of the self.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“If we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at the crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good