Quotes by Woolf, Virginia

"One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph."

Woolf, Virginia on adversity   

"Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"

Woolf, Virginia on death   

"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?"

Woolf, Virginia on doctors   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on dress   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on excellence   

"Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought."

Woolf, Virginia on faces   

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

Woolf, Virginia on feminism
4 fans of this quote   

"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."

Woolf, Virginia on fiction   

"Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand."

Woolf, Virginia on fiction   

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

Woolf, Virginia on food and eating
3 fans of this quote   

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

Woolf, Virginia on friends and friendship   

"It would be a thousand pities if women wrote like men, or lived like men, or looked like men, for if two sexes are quite inadequate, considering the vastness and variety of the world, how should we manage with one only? Ought not education to bring out and fortify the differences rather than the similarities? For we have too much likeness as it is, and if an explorer should come back and bring word of other sexes looking through the branches of other trees at other skies, nothing would be of greater service to humanity; and we should have the immense pleasure into the bargain of watching Professor X rush for his measuring-rods to prove himself superior."

Woolf, Virginia on gender   

"Different though the sexes are, they inter-mix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is very opposite of what it is above."

Woolf, Virginia on gender   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on genius   

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency."

Woolf, Virginia on age and aging   

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

Woolf, Virginia on age and aging   

"At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials."

Woolf, Virginia on age and aging   

"These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism."

Woolf, Virginia on age and aging
3 fans of this quote   

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

Woolf, Virginia on habit   

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

Woolf, Virginia on nature   

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

Woolf, Virginia on idleness   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on innocence
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on intelligence and intellectuals   

"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?"

Woolf, Virginia on intimacy   

"But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors."

Woolf, Virginia on introspection   

"Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, and ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once."

Woolf, Virginia on language   

"The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general."

Woolf, Virginia on life   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on life   

"Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street."

Woolf, Virginia on apathy
6 fans of this quote   

"Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England."

Woolf, Virginia on aristocracy   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on literature   

"Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that"

Woolf, Virginia on literature   

"For love... has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together"

Woolf, Virginia on love
3 fans of this quote   

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

Woolf, Virginia on women
3 fans of this quote   

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

Woolf, Virginia on women
6 fans of this quote   

"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?"

Woolf, Virginia on mind   

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

Woolf, Virginia on mind   

"Arrange Whatever pieces come your way."

Woolf, Virginia on opportunity   

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

Woolf, Virginia on pain
5 fans of this quote   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on peace