I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
Doris LessingRead
Whenever I met anyone who knew anything, I would bore them stiff until they told me what they knew.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the value of knowledge and the desire to learn from others.
Doris Lessing's quote emphasizes the importance of curiosity and the relentless pursuit of knowledge. It highlights a proactive approach to learning, where the speaker actively engages with knowledgeable individuals to extract valuable insights. The quote suggests that one should never hesitate to ask questions and seek information, as knowledge is a powerful tool for personal growth.
In practice
In a classroom setting to encourage students to engage with knowledgeable guests.
I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.
In the writing process, the more the story cooks, the better. The brain works for you even when you are at rest. I find dreams particularly useful. I myself think a great deal before I go to sleep and the details sometimes unfold in the dream.
Humanity's legacy of stories and storytelling is the most precious we have. All wisdom is in our stories and songs. A story is how we construct our experiences. At the very simplest, it can be: 'He/she was born, lived, died.' Probably that is the template of our stories - a beginning, middle, and end. This structure is in our minds.
There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.
The World War I, I'm a child of World War I. And I really know about the children of war. Because both my parents were both badly damaged by the war. My father, physically, and both mentally and emotionally. So, I know exactly what it's like to be brought up in an atmosphere of a continual harping on the war.
You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it.
Colleges hate geniuses, just as convents hate saints.
The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading; every man that tries it finds it so. But a great book that comes from a great thinker, β it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth, with beauty too.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest.
I guess I understand a public intellectual to be somebody who moves public discourse forward: someone who either says something new or says something that everybody knows to be true but is afraid to express.
A man with a scant vocabulary will almost certainly be a weak thinker. The richer and more copious one's vocabulary and the greater one's awareness of fine distinctions and subtle nuances of meaning, the more fertile and precise is likely to be one's thinking. Knowledge of things and knowledge of the words for them grow together. If you do not know the words, you can hardly know the thing.
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