It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
—Doris Lessing
Literature is analysis after the event.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Literature, Books, Events
Forget the long ago. We are here and we are now, and that is all. We are making a new start.
—Doris Lessing
What is a hero without love for mankind.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Heroism, Heroes/Heroism, Heroes
Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Fame
Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Self-reliance, Confidence, Thinking, Judgment
That’s what learning is: You suddenly understand something you’ve understood all your life. but in a new way.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Education, Learning, Understanding
Laughter is by definition healthy.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Laughter
The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Superstition
I don’t know much about creative writing programs. But they’re not telling the truth if they don’t teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Writing
What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate. To pretend that you don’t need love when you do; or you like your work when you know quite well you’re capable of better.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Love, Excellence, Honesty
Better Counsel comes overnight.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Advice
This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there’s a layer of people who run everything. But we—we’re just peasants. We don’t understand what’s going on, and we can’t do anything.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Experts, Professionalism
In university they don’t tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Universities, Education, Colleges, Tolerance
Pearls mean tears.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Tears, Crying
Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Genius
Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one’s unique and incredible experience is what every one shares.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Experience
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Science Fiction
The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven’t changed in seventy or eighty years. Your body changes, but you don’t change at all. And that, of course, causes great confusion.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Aging, Secrets, Age
Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Politics
It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Identity
It is individuals who change societies, give birth to ideas; who standing out against tides of opinion, change them.
—Doris Lessing
Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Faults, Mistakes
All one’s life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to being noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Women
If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
—Doris Lessing
Topics: Cats
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Beryl Bainbridge British Novelist
- P. D. James British Novelist
- Rudyard Kipling British Children’s Books Writer
- Graham Greene British Novelist
- Dorothy L. Sayers English Novelist, Playwright
- Gladys Bronwyn Stern British Novelist
- J. K. Rowling English Novelist
- H. G. Wells English Novelist, Historian
- Agatha Christie British Novelist
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon English Novelist
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