57 Quotes By Virginia Woolf


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

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.
Virginia Woolf on age

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?
Virginia Woolf on alone

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf on alone

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

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

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

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
Virginia Woolf on beauty

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

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.
Virginia Woolf on best

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

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.
Virginia Woolf on courage

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

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf on dreams

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?
Virginia Woolf on education

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

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.
Virginia Woolf on experience

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
Virginia Woolf on freedom

Some people go to priests others to poetry I to my friends.
Virginia Woolf on friendship

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.
Virginia Woolf on god