Virginia Woolf Quotes | GloryQuotes

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Women

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

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

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

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

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

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

Virginia Woolf Quotes About Life

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

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

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

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.

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.

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.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

More Quotes by Virginia Woolf

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

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.

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

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

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

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

Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.

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.

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

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

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

Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.

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

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

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

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

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

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

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.

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

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

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

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

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.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

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

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

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?

It is far more difficult to murder a phantom than a reality.

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.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.

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

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

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.

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

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

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.

Browse 85 quotes attributed to Virginia Woolf, listed in the source data as a British Author, organized around themes such as Women, Life, Writing. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.