Quotes By Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

You send a boy to school in order to make friends - the right sort.

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

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

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.

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.

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

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

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

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

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?

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

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

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

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

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

Language is wine upon the lips.

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.

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

Arrange whatever pieces come your way.

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

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

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.