Doris Lessing Quotes

Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.

Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.

People who love literature have at least part of their minds immune from indoctrination. If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

This is a time when it is frightening to be alive, when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that--a descent into barbarism, everywhere, which we are unable to check. But I think that while it is true there is a general worsening, it is precisely because things are so frightening we become hypnotized, and do not notice--or if we notice, belittle--equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization.

A public library is the most democratic thing in the world. What can be found there has undone dictators and tyrants.

Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

Time is the River on which the leaves of our thoughts are carried into oblivion.

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous.

Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences.

What matters most is that we learn from living.

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.

You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.

It has become a kind of religion that you can't criticise because then you become a traitor to the great cause, which I am not. It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests ... Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did.

Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.