Quotes by Woolf, Virginia

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on adulthood   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on adventure   

"A strange thing has happened -- while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time."

Woolf, Virginia on cinema   

"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."

Woolf, Virginia on circumstance
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"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?"

Woolf, Virginia on colleges and universities   

"Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything... it calls for confidence in oneself...And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."

Woolf, Virginia on confidence   

"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."

Woolf, Virginia on conformity
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"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."

Woolf, Virginia on controversy   

"Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the"

Woolf, Virginia on creativity   

"It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others."

Woolf, Virginia on criticism   

"Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do."

Woolf, Virginia on crowds   

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. "

Woolf, Virginia on writing   

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

Woolf, Virginia on duality   

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

Woolf, Virginia on women   

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

Woolf, Virginia on suffering torture   

"To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves. "

Woolf, Virginia on freedom   

"As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world "

Woolf, Virginia on   

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

Woolf, Virginia on   

"Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. "

Woolf, Virginia on literature men   

"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   

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

Woolf, Virginia on food   

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

Woolf, Virginia on creativity