574 Quotes by Doris Lessing

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel the roughness of a carpet under smooth soles, a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

If I have learned so much that I never expected, what more can I hope to learn and understand, providing I am patient, and do not allow myself to ask useless questions?

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.

Sometimes I think the one form of experience people are incapable of learning from is the political experience.

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

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty.

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes.

It’s a small painful sort of courage which is at the root of every life, because injustice and cruelty is at the root of life. And the reason why I have only given my attention to the heroic or the beautiful or the intelligent is because I won’t accept that injustice and the cruelty, and so won’t accept the small endurance that is bigger than anything.

The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.