Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals Quotes

“The idea of attention or contemplation, of looking carefully at something and holding it before the mind, may be conveyed early on in childhood. 'Look, listen, isn't that nice?' Also, 'Don't touch!' This is moral training as well as preparation for a pleasurable life. It need not depend on words, but can also be learnt from patterns of behaviour which should in any case back up the words. The far reaching idea of respect is included in such teaching. The, as it might seem, sophisticated concept of a work of art may be acquired easily. Children, if they are lucky, are invited to attend to pictures or objects, or listen quietly to music or stories or verses, and readily understand in what spirit they are to treat these apparently dissimilar things. They may also be encouraged to contemplate works of nature, which are unlike works of art, yet also like them in being 'beautiful.”
― Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

“Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.”
― Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

“There is an important difference between learning about virtue and practising it, and the former can indeed be a delusive substitute which effectively prevents the latter.”
― Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

“We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realize to be contingent particulars, just things among others here below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable, and as such in peril of being judged non-existent. Then the sense of the Divine vanishes in the attempt to preserve it.”
― Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals