Virginia Woolf Quotes

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

"If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people."

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

"You cannot find peace by avoiding life."

"Language is wine upon the lips."

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

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."

"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."

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

"Arrange whatever pieces come your way."

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

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

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past."

"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?"

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works."

"It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality."

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

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

"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."

"Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic."

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

"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."

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