Quotes By Virginia Woolf

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

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

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.

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

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

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?

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?

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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

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

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

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.

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?

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.