Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individual… - Iris Murdoch

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

Love is the Extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real

Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations... So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all.

You know what. You've killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don't come for me, I'll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.

How easily one is hurt. Or is it only I who am so stupidly vulnerable.