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

— Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

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More quotes by Doris Lessing

In university they don't tell you that the greater part of the law is learning to tolerate fools.

Martha Quest (1952)

That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way.

The Four-Gated City (1969)

Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.

Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006)

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

Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

The Golden Notebook (1962)

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To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.

Confucius

Greatness by nature includes a power, but not a will to power.

Martin Buber Between Man and Man (1965)

The weak shows his strength and hides his weaknesses; the magnificent exhibits his weaknesses like ornaments.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010)

They never fail who die
In a great cause.

Lord Byron

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Doris Lessing (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.