Top 826 Quotes & Sayings by Virginia Woolf - Page 3

I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.

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.

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.

it is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sense. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.

It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.

Love had a thousand shapes.

The depths of the sea are only water after all.

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?

A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.

Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.

I have lost friends, some by death...others by sheer inability to cross the street.

How lovely goodness is in those who, stepping lightly, go smiling through the world.

Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Thoughts without words… Can that be?

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

literature is the record of our discontent.

But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

The way to write well is to live intensely.

Fear no more, says the heart.

I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.

Life without illusion is a ghostly affair.

... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

She had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as daylight faded, and the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, It is enough! It is enough!

No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.

For nothing was simply one thing.

When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many as a thousand.

I want to write a novel about Silence," he said; “the things people don’t say.

I will dream today; for I must unscrew my head somehow.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet. . . indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence

We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.