Love Quote by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch refuses the easy sneer. The line sounds like it’s about romance, but it’s really a moral argument about how we rank other people’s inner lives. “Frivolous” and “base” are old-fashioned condemnations, the kind you hear from the self-appointed serious: those who believe taste is destiny and shallow people deserve shallow endings. Murdoch grants the insult terms, then quietly disarms them. Even that love, she insists - the kind between people we’d roll our eyes at, the kind that looks like gossip, convenience, vanity, or appetite - still carries “worth.”

The sentence works because it sets up a hierarchy and then sabotages it. The structure is almost judicial: evidence entered (“even when...”), verdict delivered (“not entirely without worth”). “Entirely” does the heavy lifting. She’s not romanticizing every attachment or pretending it’s pure. She’s saying the moral world isn’t clean enough for total dismissals. That is classic Murdoch: suspicious of the ego’s urge to simplify, to label people as types, to treat complex consciousness as a social category.

In the context of her fiction and philosophy, love isn’t a Hallmark glow but an ethical discipline, a way of attending to another person as real. So why extend dignity to the “frivolous” and “base”? Because contempt is lazy, and laziness is a moral failure. The subtext is a rebuke to the spectator sport of judging relationships from a distance. If love is one of the few forces that can pull us out of ourselves, even its compromised forms can still tug in the right direction.