Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

Trust no friend without faults, and love a woman, but no angel.

What is a hero without love for mankind.

Oh Doris Lessing, my dear -- your Anna is wrong about orgasms. They are no proof of love -- any more than that other Anna's fall under the wheels of that Russian train was a proof of love. It's all female shenanigans, cultural mishegoss, conditioning, brainwashing, male mythologizing. What does a woman want? She wants what she has been told she ought to want. Anna Wulf wants orgasm, Anna Karenina, death. Orgasm is no proof of anything. Orgasm is proof of orgasm. Someday every woman will have orgasms -- like every family has color TV -- and we can all get on with the real business of life.

Borrowing is not much better than begging; just as lending with interest is not much better than stealing.

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

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

Better Counsel comes overnight.

This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there's a layer of people who run everything. But we --we're just peasants. We don't understand what's going on, and we can't do anything.

Some people obtain fame, others deserve it.

Literature is analysis after the event.

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

Laughter is by definition healthy.

What's terrible is to pretend that the second-rate is first-rate, that you don't need love when you do or that you like your work when you know quite well you're capable of better.

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.

A simple grateful thought turned heavenwards is the most perfect prayer.

It is the mark of great people to treat trifles as trifles and important matters as important.

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

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

The worst superstition is to consider our own tolerable.

Pearls mean tears.

Actor: So what do you do for a living? Doris: I work for a company that makes deceptively shallow serving dishes for Chinese restaurants.

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

All sanity depends on this that is should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.

The great secret that all old people share is that you really haven't changed in 70 or 80 years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all.

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

What's terrible is to pretend that the 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.

You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accomodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself-educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this society.

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

All sanity depends on this: that it should be a delight to feel heat strike the skin, a delight to stand upright, knowing the bones are moving easily under the flesh.