Quote of the day by Iris Murdoch: 'Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real...' - An inspiring lesson on the true meaning of love, letting go of ego and looking beyond yourself to really understand others by the Irish-British novelist and philosopher

Iris Murdoch’s quote of the day is famous observation about love that asks readers to look beyond the way the emotion is usually understood. For the British novelist and philosopher, love was not simply about strong feelings or personal attachment. It involved recognising another person as an individual whose existence, thoughts and reality were independent of one’s own sense of self. This is the essence that is captured in the quote that goes, “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

The quote appeared in Murdoch’s 1959 essay The Sublime and the Good. The essay was later included in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, a collection of her philosophical and literary essays.

Quote of the day: What Murdoch meant by love

“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”


Murdoch’s idea of love was closely connected to her wider philosophical thinking about the sense of self.

She argued that people can become trapped in their own desires, assumptions and fantasies and hence this can affect how they see other people, making it difficult to recognise them as they truly are, rather than as figures shaped by one's own expectations.

Her philosophical writing repeatedly kept coming back to the importance of moving beyond this self-centred way of seeing. In this sense, the difficult part of love is not merely feeling strongly about another person. It is giving enough attention to that person to acknowledge that they have a reality separate from our own.

Murdoch described this movement away from the ego as “unselfing”. Her work connected moral life with the effort to see reality more clearly, including the reality of other people.

The idea also appears in the longer argument behind her 1959 essay. Murdoch wrote that “Art and morals are, with certain provisos… one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love.” She then connected love with discovering reality.

A philosopher who wrote through fiction

Murdoch was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919, and moved with her family to London as an infant. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford, and later became a fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she taught philosophy until 1963.

Her intellectual interests eventually extended across philosophy, literature and art. Her first published book was Sartre: Romantic Rationalist in 1953, followed by her first novel, Under the Net, in 1954.

She went on to write 26 novels, including The Bell, A Severed Head, The Black Prince and The Sea, the Sea. Her fiction frequently placed complex characters in situations involving love, morality, desire, power and conflicting relationships.

Her novels were not separate from her philosophical interests. The characters often struggle with the difference between what they imagine about other people and what those people actually are.

Her philosophy challenged the idea of the isolated self

A major part of Murdoch’s philosophy involved questioning the idea that morality begins simply with a completely free individual making rational choices.

Instead, she emphasised the complicated inner world that shapes people: their attachments, emotions, perceptions, beliefs and desires. She argued that seeing another person accurately can itself be a moral achievement.

That makes her famous statement, which is also our quote of the day about love, broader than a conventional romantic quote.

For Murdoch, recognising another person's reality requires attention. It means resisting the temptation to make someone fit neatly into our own desires or assumptions. The person we love remains a separate individual, rather than becoming an extension of ourselves.

Her philosophical work The Sovereignty of Good, published in 1970, developed many of these ideas and became one of her most influential works. She later explored related questions about morality, art, consciousness and reality in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, published in 1992.

Literary career shaped by moral questions

Murdoch's writing earned major recognition during her lifetime. She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Black Prince and the Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea in 1978.

She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1976 and a Dame Commander in 1987. Her final novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, was published in 1995.

Murdoch died in Oxford on February 8, 1999, aged 79. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1994, and her husband, novelist John Bayley, later wrote about her illness and their life together in Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch.

Yet the question at the heart of her famous line remains relevant: whether love is not only about how strongly we feel, but also about how fully we are able to recognise another person as someone separate from ourselves.