Quotes by Virginia Woolf

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

— Virginia Woolf

Life

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

— Virginia Woolf

Life

Language is wine upon the lips.

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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

— Virginia Woolf

Friendship

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.

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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

— Virginia Woolf

Truth

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.

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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

— Virginia Woolf

Life

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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

— Virginia Woolf

Success

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

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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?

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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

— Virginia Woolf

Love

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

— Virginia Woolf

Love

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

— Virginia Woolf

Success

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

— Virginia Woolf

Life

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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.

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom

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.

— Virginia Woolf

Love

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.

— Virginia Woolf

Wisdom