Quotes

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.

Virginia Woolf

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

Virginia Woolf

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.

Virginia Woolf

Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face - as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.

Virginia Woolf

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Virginia Woolf

To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.

Virginia Woolf

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Virginia Woolf

Those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

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

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Virginia Woolf

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death... others through sheer inability to cross the street.

Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

The word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.

Virginia Woolf

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

Virginia Woolf

The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself nor life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige.

Virginia Woolf

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.

Virginia Woolf