Words matter. These are the best Virginia Woolf Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Language is wine upon the lips.
Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.
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?
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
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.
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
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.
Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
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.
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.
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
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.
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
Why are women… so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
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.
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?
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.
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.
It is far harder to kill 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.
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?
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
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.
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
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.
It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
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.
One likes people much better when they’re battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
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.
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.
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.
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
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.
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people’s throats – and one always secretes too much jelly.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
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.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
