Top 826 Quotes & Sayings by Virginia Woolf
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British author Virginia Woolf.
Last updated on September 9, 2024.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
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.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.
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.
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.
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
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.
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.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Language is wine upon the lips.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
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.
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
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.
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.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
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.
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.
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.
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
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?
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
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.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
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.
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.
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.
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.
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?
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