110+ Doris Lessing Quotes On Education, Insightful And Provocative

Doris Lessing was an English writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. She wrote novels, short stories, poems, and plays, and was known for her political and feminist views. Her most famous works include The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing, and The Good Terrorist. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Doris Lessing on education, insightful, provocative.

Top 10 Doris Lessing Quotes

1. A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.
2. If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.
3. Every child has the capacity to be everything.
4. 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.
5. Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.
6. Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.
7. In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.
8. That's what learning is. You suddenly understand something you understood all your life, but in a new way.
9. Argument does not teach children or the immature. Only time and experience does that.
10. That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

Doris Lessing Short Quotes

• As you get older, you don't get wiser. You get irritable.
• Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.
• Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.
• Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.
• In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.
• I have a daughter and two grand-daughters and a great grandson in Africa, in Cape Town.
• we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.
• Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
• I treasure solitude. One doesn't have to have human contact.
• There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.

Doris Lessing Quotes About Work

In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream. — Doris Lessing

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

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

Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance! — Doris Lessing

Writers, and particularly female writers, have to fight for the conditions they need to work. — Doris Lessing

What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate, that you don't need love when you do or that you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better. — Doris Lessing

...She thinks, for the hundredth time, that in their emotional life all these intelligent men use a level so much lower than anything they use for work, that they might be different creatures. — Doris Lessing

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

Doris Lessing Quotes About Love

What is a hero without love for mankind. — Doris Lessing

So love is rest? The cosy corner? The little nook? Sometimes it ought to be. Sometimes it is. — Doris Lessing

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

A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love. — Doris Lessing

Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience, with a man they are in love with is still very small. — Doris Lessing

I don't think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn't love the place, Americans or others. — Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Quotes About People

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

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

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important. — Doris Lessing

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

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone. — Doris Lessing

We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. — Doris Lessing

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

Capable people do not understand incapacity; clever people do not understand stupidity. — Doris Lessing

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it. — Doris Lessing

I am so happy to be communicating with people on this newest of new wavelengths which to some older people must seem like a kind of magic. — Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Quotes About Learning

If you read, you can learn to think for yourself. — Doris Lessing

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad. — Doris Lessing

What matters most is that we learn from living. — Doris Lessing

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

The old watch the young with anguish, pain, fear. Above all what each has learned is what things cost, what has to be paid. — Doris Lessing

You only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. — Doris Lessing

When old settlers say 'One has to understand the country,' what they mean is, 'You have to get used to our ideas about the native.' They are saying in effect, 'Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don't want you.' — Doris Lessing

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment. — Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Quotes About Life

You have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. — Doris Lessing

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. — Doris Lessing

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do." — Doris Lessing

It is my belief...that the talents every child has, regardless of his official 'I.Q,' could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes. — Doris Lessing

When a book's pattern and the shape of its inner life is as plain to the reader as it is to the author -- then perhaps it is time to throw the book aside, as having had its day, and start again on something new. — Doris Lessing

Women's emotions are still fitted for a kind of society that no longer exists. My deep emotions, my real ones, are to do with my relationship with a man. One man. But I don't live that kind of life, and I know few women who do. So what I feel is irrelevant and silly. — Doris Lessing

What is terrible is that after every one of the phases of my life is finished, I am left with no more than some banal commonplace that everyone knows. — Doris Lessing

I hated the 1960's feminists," she says. "They were dogmatists, you see. In comes ideology, and out goes common sense. This is my experience of life. — Doris Lessing

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it? — Doris Lessing

Perhaps it is not such a bad marriage after all? There are innumerable marriages where two people, both twisted and wrong in their depths, are well matched, making each other miserable in the way they need, in the way the pattern of their life demands. — Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing Famous Quotes And Sayings

It is terrible to destroy a person's picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction. — Doris Lessing

The smell of manure, of sun on foliage, of evaporating water, rose to my head; two steps farther, and I could look down into the vegetable garden enclosed within its tall pale of reeds - rich chocolate earth studded emerald green, frothed with the white of cauliflowers, jeweled with the purple globes of eggplant and the scarlet wealth of tomatoes. — Doris Lessing

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best. — Doris Lessing

All political movements are like this - we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility. — Doris Lessing

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

I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains — Doris Lessing

The freedom of women was achieved by two things: One, the Pill. Two... by labour-saving devices like the washing machine. By science, not feminism. — Doris Lessing

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing. — Doris Lessing

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

The world is only tolerable because of the empty places in it...when the world's filled up, we'll have to get hold of a star. Any star. Venus, or Mars. Get hold of it and leave it empty. Man needs an empty space somewhere for his spirit to rest in. — Doris Lessing

I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present. — Doris Lessing

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. — Doris Lessing

What is charm then? The free giving of a grace, the spending of something given by nature in her role of spendthrift ... something extra, superfluous, unnecessary, essentially a power thrown away. — Doris Lessing

What women will say to other women grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism is often the last thing they will say aloud - a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. — Doris Lessing

Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape. — Doris Lessing

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones moving easily under the flesh. — Doris Lessing

The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself. — Doris Lessing

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals. — Doris Lessing

Better Counsel comes overnight. — Doris Lessing

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever be. — Doris Lessing

Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time. — Doris Lessing

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

Free women," said Anna, wryly. She added, with an anger new to Molly, so that she earned another quick scrutinizing glance from her friend: "They still define us in terms of relationships with men, even the best of them. — Doris Lessing

Coincidences are God's way of remaining anonymous. — Doris Lessing

It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you. — Doris Lessing

Literature is analysis after the event. — Doris Lessing

And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It is a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible. — Doris Lessing

You are taken, shaken, by moments when the improbability of our lives comes over you like a fever. Everything is remarkable, people, living, events present themselves to you with the immediacy of players in some barbarous and splendid drama that it seems we are part of. You have been given new eyes. — Doris Lessing

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. — Doris Lessing

Sleep is harder to reach and thinner, and sleeping is no longer the Drop into the black pit all oblivion until the alarm clock, no, sleep is thin and fitful and full of memories and reminders and the dark is never dark enough. — Doris Lessing

As the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them. — Doris Lessing

Laughter is by definition healthy. — Doris Lessing

The youth do not see the old. They are not programmed to see the old, who are cancelled, negated, wiped out. — Doris Lessing

How boring these emotions are that we're caught in and can't get free of, no matter how much we want to. — Doris Lessing

We, as a society, can't tolerate very much difference. — Doris Lessing

Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter. — Doris Lessing

Don't read a book out of its right time for you. — Doris Lessing

In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves. — Doris Lessing

The Golden Notebook for some reason surprised people but it was no more than you would hear women say in their kitchens every day in any country... I was really astounded that some people were shocked. — Doris Lessing

Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot. — Doris Lessing

The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed. — Doris Lessing

Oh cat, I'd say, or pray: be-ootiful cat! Delicious cat! Exquisite cat! Satiny cat! Cat like a soft owl, cat with paws like moths, jewelled cat, miraculous cat! Cat, cat, cat, cat. — Doris Lessing

One novel in five hundred or a thousand has the quality a novel should have to make it a novel -- the quality of philosophy. — Doris Lessing

None of you [men] ask for anything - except everything, but just for so long as you need it. — Doris Lessing

The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid. — Doris Lessing

You simply don't get to be wise, mature, etc., unless you've been a raving cannibal for thirty years or so. — Doris Lessing

Mostly getting old is boring. I hate the stiffness in the bones. I was physically arrogant for years. I don't like it now that I have difficulty getting around. But a certain equanimity sets in, a certain detachment. Things seem less desperately important than they once did, and that's a pleasure. — Doris Lessing

All things come alike to all; there is one event to the righteous, and to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to him that sacrificeth, and to him that sacrificeth not. — Doris Lessing

Pearls mean tears. — Doris Lessing

The white man has settled like a locust over Africa, and, like the locusts in early morning, cannot take flight for the heaviness of the dew on their wings. But the dew that weights the white man is the money that he makes from our labor. — Doris Lessing

He destroyed in her the knowing, doubting, sophisticated Ella, and again and again he put her intelligence to sleep, and with her willing connivance, so that she floated darkly on her love for him, on her naivety, which is another word for a spontaneous creative faith. And when his own distrust of himself destroyed this woman-in-love, so that she began thinking, she would fight to return to naivety. — Doris Lessing

Anna was saying to herself: why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It's childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I'm scared of being alone in what I feel. — Doris Lessing

[The Golden Notebook] was not a trumpet for Women's Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being on the theme of "She is unfeminine", "She is a man-hater". — Doris Lessing

I lived in a brilliantly lit haze, shifting and flickering according to my changing desires. Of course, that is only a description of being young. — Doris Lessing

Writers brought up in Africa have many advantages - being at the center of a modern battlefield; part of a society in rapid, dramatic change. But in a long run it can also be a handicap: to wake up every morning with one's eyes on a fresh evidence of inhumanity; to be reminded twenty times a day of injustice, and always the same brand of it, can be limiting. — Doris Lessing

This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by those who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them. — Doris Lessing

People don't mind immoral messages. They don't mind art which says that murder is good, cruelty is good, sex for sex's sake is good. They like it, provided the message is wrapped up a little. And they like messages saying that murder is bad, cruelty is bad, and love is love is love is love. What they can't stand is to be told it all doesn't matter, they can't stand formlessness. — Doris Lessing

It is quite easy to remark the absurdities and contradictions of a country's social system from outside its borders, but very difficult if one has been brought up in it. — Doris Lessing

Growing up is, after all, only the understanding that one's unique and incredible experience is what every one shares. — Doris Lessing

I would not be at all surprised to find out . . . that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess. — Doris Lessing

The whole process of writing is a setting at a distance. That is the value of it - to the writer, and to the people who read the results of this process, which takes the raw, the individual, the uncriticized, the unexamined, into the realm of the general. — Doris Lessing

We are all creatures of the stars and their forces, they make us, we make them, we are part of a dance from which we by no means and not ever may consider ourselves separate. — Doris Lessing

Living in a small town anywhere means preserving one's self behind a mask. — Doris Lessing

Life Lessons by Doris Lessing

1. Doris Lessing taught us to never give up on our dreams, no matter how difficult they may seem. She also showed us that it's important to stay true to our values and beliefs, even when faced with opposition. Finally, she showed us that it's possible to find joy and meaning in life, even in the face of adversity.