Doris Lessing

More from 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.

  The Golden Notebook (1962), Paul Tanner, in “Free Women: 1”

  • Intelligence
  • Truth & Lies

• 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.

  Salon interview (1997)

  • Enemies
  • Politics

• What’s terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is the 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.

  The Golden Notebook (1962), Anna Wulf, in “Free Women: 2”

  • Love
  • Work

All 12 quotes from Doris Lessing

Popular quotes

• No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent.

  John Donne1572–1631No Man Is an Island (1624), Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), Meditation 17In context

• I came, I saw, I conquered.

  Julius Caesar100–44 BCInscription on the triumphal wagon reported in The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, as translated by Robert Graves (1957).

  • Success

• The unexamined life is not worth living.

  Socrates470–399 BCThe Apology of Socrates (399 BC)

  • Philosophy