Quotes By Virginia Woolf

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.

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

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

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

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.

Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

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

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

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

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

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

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

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

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

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

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.