Doris Lessing Quotes

It's difficult to have any animosity towards someone if you recognize that on so many levels they're exactly the same as you.

We have much more in common with other people than we have apart.

It's never the differences between people that suprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

I'm always astounded at the way we automatically look at what divides and separates us. We never look at what people have in common. If you see it, black and white people, both sides look to see the differences, they don't look at what they have together. Men and women, and old and young, and so on. And this is a disease of the mind, the way I see it. Because in actual fact, men and women have much more in common than they are separated.

I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.

We are all quick to point out all the differences but not as willing to accept what bonds us as humans.

No one is ever really a stranger. We cling to the belief that we share nothing with certain people. It's rubbish. We have almost everything in common with everyone.

Probably above all other things, I am interested as a writer in making a connection, interested in the parts of all of us that connect.

It's nice to feel like you have more in common with people rather than more differences.

We can learn to see each other and see ourselves in each other and recognize that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.

It's interesting to go places and see that, at the end of the day, people just want to feel safe, and what that looks like to them varies... but that was encouraging to see that there is more common ground than perhaps I realized.

There's a universal inside of me. So if I tell my story, you're going to see parts of your story in it. I don't know which parts, but we all overlap. We're all very much alike.

The ways in which we are similar are far more numerous than the ways in which we are different.

All the media and the politicians ever talk about is things that separate us, things that make us different from one another

The one thing we all have in common is that we're human. Why pay more attention to the things that make us different over the things that bring us together?

As we form our individual opinions of our fellow man, let us base them on our similarities and not our differences.

The truth of my experience is that we are all a lot more alike than we are different.

I like it that in many ways we are all the same.

Among the most striking things that I have learned is how much we have in common. I've sat down with people everywhere, discussing what was in their hearts and on their minds. And it doesn't take long to find commonality, which is often overlooked, ignored, dismissed, and rejected otherwise.

It is easier to tell a story of how people wound one another than of what binds them together.

I'm no different than you.

There is always someone in the world who is better or worse off than yourself, and I've never seen that - in either direction - as a barrier to becoming friends with somebody.

All of us are much more human than otherwise.

What I like in novels that I read and enjoy is interplay of theme: the mystery of how we seem to be so separate as human beings.

There are so many people in the world with so many different perspectives. But ultimately, at the heart of it, they're people.