Virginia Woolf Quotes (269 Quotes)

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.

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.

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

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

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

If we didn't live adventurously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I've no doubt but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.

What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally, like a voyager who touches another planet with the tip of his toe, upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment.

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.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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.

Now, aged 50, I'm just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.

Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the health of their fame as men are, and, speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.

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.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

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

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.

What did she feel Did she love him, or did she feel nothing at all for him or for any other man, being, as she had said that afternoon, free, like the wind or the sea

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

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

That complete statement which is literature.

If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?

It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything.

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

We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey.

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

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

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

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.

I am to be broken. I am to be derided all my life. I am to be cast up and down among these men and women, with their twitching faces, with their lying tongues, like a cork on a rough sea. Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door opens.

The first duty of a lecturer to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks, and keep on the mantelpiece forever.

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.

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.

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.

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?

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

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

When a subject is highly controversial... one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one's audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.

It will be all over this day week - comfort - discomfort and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of traveling.

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.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

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.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

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

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

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.