07/02/2024

It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were accidental. The level at which that love works which is art is deeper than the level at which we deliberate concerning improvement. And indeed it is of the nature of love to be something deeper than our conscious and more simply social morality, and to be sometimes destructive of it. That is why all dictators, and would-be dictators… have mistrusted art

— Existentialists and Mystics, Iris Murdoch