Art & Creativity Quote by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch’s line smuggles a moral claim into what can sound like an aesthetic shrug: art isn’t decoration, it’s ethical labor. Not moralizing in the sermon sense, but “virtuous” as a disciplined attention to reality. The phrase “a struggle to be” matters most. It rejects the romantic idea that art is pure overflow or effortless inspiration; it’s a wrestle with ego, laziness, cliché, and the seductions of easy meaning. Virtue here isn’t a badge the artist wears, it’s a practice the work must earn.

The sly pivot is “in a particular sort of way.” Murdoch refuses one-size-fits-all righteousness. A novel’s virtue isn’t the same as a painting’s, and neither is reducible to having the “right” politics or a tidy lesson. The moral test is internal to the form: does the work see clearly, resist simplification, grant other people their full strangeness? That’s Murdoch’s philosophical preoccupation showing through: goodness as “unselfing,” an escape from the mind’s constant urge to make the world flatter, more flattering, more manageable.

Context helps. Writing in the mid-to-late 20th century, Murdoch watched modernism’s suspicion of moral content and the postwar hunger for seriousness collide. Her fiction is crowded with desire, self-deception, and accidental cruelty; her ethics insists that attention is the antidote. So the quote reads like a quiet rebuke to both propaganda and pure aestheticism: the best art doesn’t preach, but it does train us to look longer, harder, and with less vanity.