Virginia Woolf the Author, biography, facts and quotes

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

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

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

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

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

"I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past"

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

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

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

"The older one grows, the more one likes indecency"

"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"

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

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

"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"

"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"

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

"Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent"

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

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

"Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them"

"Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded"

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

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

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

"Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice"

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

"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?"

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

"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"

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

"That great Cathedral space which was childhood"

"My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery - always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What's this passion for?"

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

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

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

"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"

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

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

"This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant"

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

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

"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?"

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman"

"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"

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

"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"

"Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic"

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

Born as	Adeline Virginia Woolf
Occup.	Author
From	United Kingdom
Born	January 25, 1882
Died	March 28, 1941
Aged	59 years

Virginia Woolf Biography

74 Famous quotes by Virginia Woolf