Virginia Woolf

Find the best quotes, maxims and aphorisms of Virginia Woolf

Biography : English writer.
Born: 1882 - Died: 1941
Period:
20th century
19th century
Place of birth: United Kingdom

United Kingdom

Virginia Woolf - Quotes

Few people ask from books what books can give us.
Virginia Woolf /

In fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Virginia Woolf /

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Virginia Woolf /

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.
Virginia Woolf

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.
Virginia Woolf

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

It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
Virginia Woolf

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

genius

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.
Virginia Woolf

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf

habit

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.
Virginia Woolf

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

humour

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Virginia Woolf

The connection between dress and war is not far to seek your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.
Virginia Woolf

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
Virginia Woolf

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

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.
Virginia Woolf

happiness

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

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

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
Virginia Woolf

It's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.
Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

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

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?
Virginia Woolf

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
Virginia Woolf

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