Top 300 Doris Lessing Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Doris Lessing

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

102. “A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.”

— Doris Lessing

103. “The words of a wise man’s mouth are gracious; but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself.”

— Doris Lessing

104. “Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.”

— Doris Lessing

105. “When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia.”

— Doris Lessing

106. “Women are slaves to their beauty.”

— Doris Lessing

107. “There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.”

— Doris Lessing

108. “There is no such thing as a frigid woman, there are only incompetent men.”

— Doris Lessing

109. “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

110. “Envy has always hidden behind moral indignation.”

— Doris Lessing

111. “Men are unwise and curiously planned.”

— Doris Lessing

112. “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

113. “But children can’t be a center of life and a reason for being. They can be a thousand things that are delightful, interesting, satisfying, but they can’t be a well-spring to live from. Or they shouldn’t be.”

— Doris Lessing

114. “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

115. “I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed.”

— Doris Lessing

116. “I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn’t changed: you have.”

— Doris Lessing

117. “Women often get dropped from memory, and then history.”

— Doris Lessing

118. “Intelligence forbids tears.”

— Doris Lessing

119. “The older I get the more secrets I have, never to be revealed and this, I know, is a common condition of people my age. and why all this emphasis on kissing and telling? Kisses are the least of it.”

— Doris Lessing

120. “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

121. “The difficulty of writing about sex, for women, is that sex is best when not thought about, not analysed.”

— Doris Lessing

122. “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

123. “The critics slap labels on you and then expect you to talk inside their terms.”

— Doris Lessing

124. “Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.”

— Doris Lessing

125. “Better Counsel comes overnight.”

— Doris Lessing

126. “I treasure solitude. One doesn’t have to have human contact.”

— Doris Lessing

127. “It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests of truth or some other abstraction.”

— Doris Lessing

128. “You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents.”

— Doris Lessing

129. “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

130. “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

131. “This is because the nature of this place is a strong emotion – “nostalgia” is their word for it – which means a longing for what has never been, or at least not in the form and shape imagined.”

— Doris Lessing

132. “I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that “other eye,” which we can use to judge ourselves.”

— Doris Lessing

133. “What I really can’t stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible.”

— Doris Lessing

134. “Parents should leave books lying around marked ‘forbidden’ if they want their children to read.”

— Doris Lessing

135. “If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.”

— Doris Lessing

136. “We use our parents like recurring dreams, to be entered into when needed.”

— Doris Lessing

137. “What really fascinates me is this need that is so strong now that if you read a work of the imagination you instantly have to say, ‘Oh, what this really is is so-and-so,’ reducing it to a simple formula.”

— Doris Lessing

Featured in: Strong Quotes

138. “Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!”

— Doris Lessing

139. “The cleverest trick of the Devil is that nobody believes in him. It. Her. Well, we have been very stupid.”

— Doris Lessing

140. “Anna, there’s something very arrogant about insisting on the right to be right.”

— Doris Lessing

141. “For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating, rejuvenating, exciting and satisfying.”

— Doris Lessing

142. “I don’t think San Francisco needs defending. I never meet anyone who doesn’t love the place, Americans or others.”

— Doris Lessing

143. “Every spendthrift passion has its attendant courtiers.”

— Doris Lessing

144. “Charity has always been a expression of the guilty consciences of a ruling class.”

— Doris Lessing

145. “I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.”

— Doris Lessing

146. “If one person has loved another truly and wholly, then it is more than love that collapses when one side of the indissoluble partnership turns away with a tearful goodbye.”

— Doris Lessing

147. “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

148. “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.”

— Doris Lessing

149. “Nicknames are potent ways of cutting people down to size.”

— Doris Lessing

150. “Sometimes I dislike women, I dislike us all, because of our capacity for not-thinking when it suits us; we choose not to think when we are reaching our for happiness.”

— Doris Lessing