Quotes

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

Virginia Woolf

The first duty of a lecturer - to hand you after an hour's discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantlepiece forever.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Virginia Woolf

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?

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness.

Virginia Woolf

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

Remember if you marry for beauty, thou bindest thyself all thy life for that which perchance, will neither last nor please thee one year: and when thou hast it, it will be to thee of no price at all.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

[Queen Victoria] knew her own mind. But the mind radically commonplace, only its inherited force, and cumulative sense of power, making it remarkable.

Virginia Woolf

Publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood. The desire to be veiled still possesses them. They are not even now as concerned about the heath of their fame as men are, and speaking generally, will pass a tombstone or a signpost without feeling an irresistible desire to cut their names on it.

Virginia Woolf

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.

Virginia Woolf

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.

Virginia Woolf

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf