Life & Wisdom Quote by Doris Lessing

Greatness, in Lessing's formulation, isn’t charisma or conquest; it’s proportion. The line reads like etiquette for the mind: a refusal to inflate the petty into the catastrophic or to let the genuinely consequential get flattened into background noise. The craft is in its blunt symmetry - "trifles as trifles" / "important matters as important" - a rhythmic sorting mechanism that makes the idea feel less like advice and more like a standard.

Lessing’s subtext is a quiet indictment of modern emotional mismanagement: people who perform outrage over crumbs while staying strangely calm about collapsing structures. Treating trifles as if they’re life-or-death is a kind of narcissism, a way to center the self in every minor inconvenience. Treating important matters like trifles is its twin vice: a cultivated numbness that passes for sophistication, the shrug that protects comfort.

Context matters because Lessing wrote out of political disillusionment and hard-won realism. Her work circles the gap between private dramas and public catastrophe, and she’s suspicious of societies that excel at distraction. The quote doubles as a survival tactic, too: in turbulent times, you need triage - attention is finite, moral energy even more so.

The intent isn’t to preach stoicism as repression; it’s to defend judgment as a moral skill. Knowing what deserves your fear, your anger, your patience, your action - that’s the grown-up part of being alive, and Lessing makes it sound like the simplest thing. That’s the sting.