Midweek pick-me-up: Iris Murdoch on love

Robert Graves defined love as “a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that... makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.”

Freedom is exercised in the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.