Quotes by Virginia Woolf

About Virginia Woolf:

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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?

Virginia Woolf

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

Virginia Woolf

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Virginia Woolf

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Virginia Woolf

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

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

Virginia Woolf

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.

Virginia Woolf

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 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.

Virginia Woolf

Author Bio

  • NameVirginia Woolf
  • DescriptionEnglish writer
  • AliasesAdeline Virginia Woolf; Adeline Virginia Stephen
  • BornJanuary 25, 1882
  • DiedMarch 28, 1941
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWoman Of Letters; Novelist; Essayist; Autobiographer; Short Story Writer; Diarist; Literary Critic; Publisher
  • WorksTo The Lighthouse; Mrs Dalloway; Orlando: A Biography; A Room Of One's Own