Life & Wisdom Quote by Doris Lessing

Lessing’s line sounds like a permission slip, but it’s really an ultimatum: have the courage to risk being wrong in public. The provocation is in the first clause. “Think wrongly” isn’t a celebration of ignorance; it’s a shot at the social economy that rewards safe opinions, correct affiliations, and pre-approved language. She’s warning that outsourced thinking is the real intellectual sin, even when it arrives dressed up as consensus, expertise, or good taste.

The subtext is about power. To “think for yourself” is not simply a private mental act; it’s a refusal to let institutions (schools, parties, movements, media ecosystems) do your moral accounting for you. Lessing knew how quickly group belief hardens into dogma, and how dogma recruits fear: fear of being isolated, mocked, “on the wrong side.” By granting you the right to be wrong, she strips that fear of its leverage. Error becomes the cost of independence, not evidence against it.

Context matters: Lessing’s work moved through communism’s allure and disillusionment, feminism’s internal fractures, and the broader 20th century’s mass-ideology machine. She watched people trade curiosity for certainty because certainty feels like belonging. The quote works because it doesn’t flatter the reader with “be right”; it dares the reader to be free, which is harsher. Freedom, she implies, comes with embarrassment, revision, and the loneliness of an unrepeatable thought.