Virginia Woolf Quotes

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.

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

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

It was completely fruitless to quarrel with the world, whereas the quarrel with oneself was occasionally fruitful and always, she had to admit, interesting.

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.

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

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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?

Language is wine upon the lips.

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

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

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.

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

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

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.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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

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

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

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

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

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

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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?