Virginia Woolf Quotes

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

Let us not take for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is a woman's whole existence.

Criticism? An artist wants praise. Praise.

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?

How can I express the darkness?

To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.

... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

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.

literature is the record of our discontent.

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

Love had a thousand shapes.

I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.

I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

Well, we must wait for the future to show.

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.

With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes -- one of the tragedies of married life.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

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 enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older.

I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read; what I haven't read.

I am not so gifted as at one time seemed likely.

For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

Consolation for those moments when you can't tell whether you're the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.

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.

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.

But I don't think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.

And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.

The truer the facts the better the fiction.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it's place?

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

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.

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.

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

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.

Marvelous are the innocent.

No, I'm not clever. I've always cared more for people than for ideas.

Life would split apart without letters.

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

They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.

The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.