Doris Lessing Quotes

I just love to read, learn, and think through complex things.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

Education is gathering information and reading... No human being can thrive without some form of education. How you get it is up to you - the important thing is that you get it.

The finest minds seem to be formed rather by efforts at original thinking, by endeavors to form new combinations, and to discover new truths, than by passively receiving the impressions of other men's ideas.

I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.

One must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

One of the first things I think young people, especially nowadays, should learn is how to see for yourself and listen for yourself and think for yourself.

He says, you have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else but you can’t make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure and no one in the world can interfere with it. If you won the Irish Sweepstakes and bought a house that needed furniture would you fill it with bits and pieces of rubbish? Your mind is your house and if you fill it with rubbish from the cinemas it will rot in your head. You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace.

Read, read read. Read everything.

Keep reading books, but remember that a book’s only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

In a sense, there's a great truth to that, but, also I was a great reader.

I think I learned a lot from reading in general - even from reading badly written books.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

Learn as much by writing as by reading.

The proper method for hastening the decay of error is by teaching every man to think for himself.

People who don't read seem to me mysterious. I don't know how they think or learn about other people. Novels are a very important part of our education.

Read books. They are good for us.

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

Going to college is neither necessary nor sufficient to be well-educated.

I read Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Reader's Digest... I read some responsible journalism, and from that, I form my own opinions. I also happen to be intelligent, and I question everything.

More people should read books. It's the most concentrated experience you can have.

The more one reads, the more one sees that one has to read.

I am a part of everything that I have read.