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Doris Lessing Inspirational Quotes (176)

Page 7 of 8
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The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.
Doris Lessing
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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
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The automatic reaction of practically any young person is, at once, against authority. That, I think, began in the First World War because of the trenches, and the incompetence of the people on all fronts.
Doris Lessing
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The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.
Doris Lessing
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Loneliness, she thought, was craving for other people's company. But she did not know that loneliness can be an unnoticed cramping of the spirit for lack of companionship.
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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The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.
Doris Lessing
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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
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I don't think that the feminist movement has done much for the characters of women.
Doris Lessing
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Novels give you the matrix of emotions, give you the flavour of a time in a way formal history cannot.
Doris Lessing
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Bad luck for both of us, we are both boulder-pushers.
Doris Lessing
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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.
Doris Lessing
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At no time, anywhere, was the population of a country told the truth: facts about events trickled into general consciousness much later, if ever.
Doris Lessing
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If you read, you can learn to think for yourself.
Doris Lessing
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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
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I didn't go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading.
Doris Lessing
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Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.
Doris Lessing
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The most exciting periods of literature have always been those when the critics were great.
Doris Lessing
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Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
Doris Lessing
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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
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All politicians are not the same. I've never felt that way. What is the same is that voters get very excited about new faces, like Clinton and Blair - and they have unrealistic expectations that the world will change overnight. A cynical old hand like myself knows that it won't.
Doris Lessing
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there are two kinds of humanity, those who dream and those who don't, and both tend to despise, or to tolerate, the other.
Doris Lessing
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A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it's for a half-second, 'Perhaps this is THE man.
Doris Lessing
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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
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