Virginia Woolf Quotes And Sayings

Adeline Virginia Woolf, known professionally as Virginia Woolf, was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

One Cannot Think Well, Love Well, Sleep Well, If One Has Not Dined Well.

The Eyes Of Others Our Prisons; Their Thoughts Our Cages.

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.

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?

Every Secret Of A Writer's Soul, Every Experience Of His Life, Every Quality Of His Mind Is Written Large In His Works.

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.

I Want The Concentration And The Romance, And The Worlds All Glued Together, Fused, Glowing: Have No Time To Waste Any More On Prose.

It Is Far Harder To Kill A Phantom Than A Reality.

Where The Mind Is Biggest, The Heart, The Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, And The Rest Of Them Scarcely Have Room To Breathe.

You Cannot Find Peace By Avoiding Life.

It Is Far More Difficult To Murder A Phantom Than A Reality.

The Telephone, Which Interrupts The Most Serious Conversations And Cuts Short The Most Weighty Observations, Has A Romance Of Its Own.

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 Has To Secrete A Jelly In Which To Slip Quotations Down People's Throats - And One Always Secretes Too Much Jelly.

It Seems As If An Age Of Genius Must Be Succeeded By An Age Of Endeavour; Riot And Extravagance By Cleanliness And Hard Work.

The Beautiful Seems Right By Force Of Beauty, And The Feeble Wrong Because Of Weakness.

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.

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.

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.

Indeed, I Would Venture To Guess That Anon, Who Wrote So Many Poems Without Signing Them, Was Often A Woman.

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.

Humor Is The First Of The Gifts To Perish In A Foreign Tongue.

One Likes People Much Better When They're Battered Down By A Prodigious Siege Of Misfortune Than When They Triumph.

Yet It Is In Our Idleness, In Our Dreams, That The Submerged Truth Sometimes Comes To The Top.

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.

Rigid, The Skeleton Of Habit Alone Upholds The Human Frame.

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.

Boredom Is The Legitimate Kingdom Of The Philanthropic.

To Enjoy Freedom We Have To Control Ourselves.

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.

Language Is Wine Upon The Lips.

The Beauty Of The World, Which Is So Soon To Perish, Has Two Edges, One Of Laughter, One Of Anguish, Cutting The Heart Asunder.

Nothing Has Really Happened Until It Has Been Recorded.

Someone Has To Die In Order That The Rest Of Us Should Value Life More.

Yet, It Is True, Poetry Is Delicious; The Best Prose Is That Which Is Most Full Of Poetry.

It Is Fatal To Be A Man Or Woman Pure And Simple: One Must Be A Woman Manly, Or A Man Womanly.

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.

I Thought How Unpleasant It Is To Be Locked Out; And I Thought How It Is Worse, Perhaps, To Be Locked In.

Really I Don't Like Human Nature Unless All Candied Over With Art.

On The Outskirts Of Every Agony Sits Some Observant Fellow Who Points.

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.

If You Do Not Tell The Truth About Yourself You Cannot Tell It About Other People.

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.

Great Bodies Of People Are Never Responsible For What They Do.

Women Have Served All These Centuries As Looking Glasses Possessing The Power Of Reflecting The Figure Of Man At Twice Its Natural Size.

The Older One Grows, The More One Likes Indecency.

When The Shriveled Skin Of The Ordinary Is Stuffed Out With Meaning, It Satisfies The Senses Amazingly.

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?