Doris Lessing: Quotes about thinking

Doris Lessing was British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer. Explore interesting quotes on thinking.

Doris Lessing: 188 quotes23 likes

“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 book The Golden Notebook

Source: The Golden Notebook

“Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

The Golden Notebook (1962)
Context: Do you know what people really want? Everyone, I mean. Everybody in the world is thinking: I wish there was just one other person I could really talk to, who could really understand me, who'd be kind to me. That's what people really want, if they're telling the truth.

“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

Salon interview (1997)
Context: 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. I think that a terrible bitterness and anger began there, which led to communism. And now it feeds terrorism. Anyway, that's my thesis. It's very oversimplified, as you can see.

“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

“Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.”

Doris Lessing

Interview with Amanda Craig, "Grand dame of letters who's not going quietly," The Times, London (23 November 2003)
Variant: Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

“The worst of superstitions is to think
One's own most bearable.”

Doris Lessing

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan the Wise (1779), Act IV, scene II http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/natws10.txt <br class="br">Variant translation: The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable. <br class="br">Misattributed

“There was a kind of shifting of the balances of my brain, of the way I had been thinking, the same kind of realignment as when, a few days before, words like democracy, liberty, freedom, had faded under pressure of a new sort of understanding of the real movement of the world towards dark, hardening power. I knew, but of course the word, written, cannot convey the quality of this knowing, that whatever already is has its logic and its force. I felt this, like a vision, in a new kind of knowing. And I knew that the cruelty and the spite and the I. I. I. I. of Saul and of Anna were part of the logic of war; and I knew how strong these emotions were, in a way that would never leave me, would become part of how I saw the world.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Anna Wulf, in "Free Women: 4"
The Golden Notebook (1962)

“I think it possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world-ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects, and creeds. But it was an attempt.”

Doris Lessing book The Golden Notebook

Introduction (1971)
The Golden Notebook (1962)

“There are certain types of people who are political out of a kind of religious reason […] I think it's fairly common among socialists: They are, in fact, God-seekers, looking for the kingdom of God on earth. A lot of religious reformers have been like that, too. It's the same psychological set, trying to abolish the present in favor of some better future — always taking it for granted that there is a better future. If you don't believe in heaven, then you believe in socialism. When I was in my real Communist phase, I and the people around me really believed — but, of course, this makes us certifiable — that something like 10 years after World War II, the world would be Communist and perfect.”

Doris Lessing

quoted in "Doris Lessing on Feminism, Communism and Space Fiction" http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/01/10/specials/lessing-space.html (25 July 1982), Lesley Hazelton, New York Times Book Review

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

Doris Lessing

"Literature Nobel Awarded to Writer Doris Lessing" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=15195588 All Things Considered NPR (11 October 2007)