Love Quote by Iris Murdoch

Murdoch’s line is a small rebuke to the fantasy that love is a theory you can master in private. “We can only learn to love by loving” folds instruction into action: love isn’t an abstract virtue you read about, it’s a practice that changes you precisely because it exposes you. The phrasing is almost tautological, and that’s the point. Murdoch uses the logic-loop to trap the reader in a simple truth modern culture loves to dodge: you don’t get a safe apprenticeship.

The intent is ethical, not sentimental. As a novelist-philosopher, Murdoch spent her career pushing back on the ego’s talent for self-deception. Here, “learn” suggests discipline and failure, not a sudden epiphany. Loving is framed less as a feeling than as a repeated choice that trains attention outward. The subtext is that you can’t become “good at love” through aspiration, self-knowledge, or aesthetic sensitivity alone. Those can still be ways of polishing the self. Only the messy contact with other people - their needs, their unpredictability, the demand to see them as real - breaks the mirror.

Context matters: postwar British moral philosophy often leaned on rules, duties, systems. Murdoch argued that morality begins in the quality of our perception. This quote compresses that argument into a pocket-sized imperative. It also punctures the contemporary fixation on “being ready” for relationships, as if readiness is a credential earned offstage. Murdoch’s wager is braver: love is the classroom, and the tuition is risk.