On looking at what is there
“Humility is not a peculiar habit of self-effacement, rather like having an inaudible voice: it is selfless respect for reality and one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”
Murdoch is rescuing a word. Humility as most people use it is a performance of smallness, and she has no interest in it — an inaudible voice is not a virtue, it is a habit.
What she means instead is attention that does not bend what it finds toward the self. That is harder than modesty, and it is why she calls it central: almost every other failure of seeing starts as a small adjustment made in one's own favour.