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.Collection: Courage
Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Time
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.Collection: Truth
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.Collection: Food
Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.Collection: Poetry
Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.Collection: Death
Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.Collection: Dreams
Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?Collection: Women
The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers.Collection: War
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?Collection: Education
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.Collection: Women
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.Collection: History
The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.Collection: Beauty
Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.Collection: Experience
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Independence
If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?Collection: Women
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.Collection: Peace
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.Collection: Beauty
Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.Collection: Humor
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.Collection: Experience
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?Collection: Alone
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.Collection: Truth
It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.Collection: Age
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.Collection: Business
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.Collection: Truth
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Best
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Intelligence
I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.Collection: God
Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.Collection: Alone
The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.Collection: Romantic
When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.Collection: Amazing
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.Collection: Men
That great Cathedral space which was childhood.Collection: Space
Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
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?
The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
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.
Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.
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.
You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.
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.
One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.