Best Quotes by Doris Lessing (Top 10)
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Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
Doris Lessing
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What's terrible is to pretend that 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
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Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
Doris Lessing
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That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.
Doris Lessing
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In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
Doris Lessing
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It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.
Doris Lessing
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There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.
Doris Lessing
More Doris Lessing Quotes
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A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
Doris Lessing
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Laughter is by definition healthy.
Doris Lessing
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Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
Doris Lessing
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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
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Think wrongly if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
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What is a hero without love for mankind.
Doris Lessing
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Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.
Doris Lessing
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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
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With a library you are free, not confined by temporary political climates. It is the most democratic of institutions because no one - but no one at all - can tell you what to read and when and how.
Doris Lessing
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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
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It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.
Doris Lessing
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
Doris Lessing
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Better Counsel comes overnight.
Doris Lessing
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What matters most is that we learn from living.
Doris Lessing
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Literature is analysis after the event.
Doris Lessing