Doris Lessing on experience

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

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.

I’m always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

Mark Twain1835–1910

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

Mark Twain1835–1910

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Aldous Huxley1894–1963Texts and Pretexts (1932), p. 5