Virginia Woolf Quotations

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

We can best help you to prevent war not by repeating your words and following your methods but by finding new words and creating new methods.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

If we help an educated man's daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? - not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

It is curious how instinctively one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed any longer.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

If we didn't live adventurously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.

Humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery -always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others

For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.

They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.

When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.

Who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title

What is meant by ''reality''? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable -- now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.

Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradles. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.

A woman must have money and a room of her own.

A woman must have money and room of her own if she is to write fiction

You send a boy to school in order to make friends of the right sort.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man, at twice its natural size