Life & Wisdom Quote by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch’s line has the tidy, unsettling poise of a moral philosopher who knows how quickly “the sacred” can be manufactured. “I daresay” is doing sly work: it softens the claim into conversational modesty while smuggling in something radical, even accusatory. Holiness, in her framing, is not a property waiting inside certain objects or doctrines. It’s an effect, produced by attention. Worship doesn’t discover value; it confers it.

The pivot is “sincerely.” Murdoch isn’t talking about cynical propaganda or performative piety. She’s pointing at the frightening potency of genuine devotion, the kind that can sanctify almost anything: a lover, a nation, an ideology, an aesthetic. That’s where the subtext bites. If sincerity is enough, then moral danger doesn’t only come from hypocrisy; it comes from earnestness aimed at the wrong target. The sentence reads like a warning to anyone tempted to equate intensity of feeling with ethical truth.

Context matters because Murdoch spent her career arguing that moral life is less about willpower and more about disciplined perception - learning to see beyond the ego’s fantasies. Worship, here, is a concentrated form of attention, and attention can either clarify or distort. In a secular age, the quote also maps neatly onto modern substitute religions: fandoms, markets, selfhood, political tribes. We don’t lose the impulse to venerate; we just redeploy it. Murdoch’s genius is refusing to romanticize that impulse while admitting its creative force.