Sign in with your pod

Famous quotes

Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide

EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina

Virginia Woolf

139 quotes

• “While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The trumpeters, ranging themselves side by side in order, blow one terrific blast: — 'THE TRUTH! at which Orlando woke. He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess — he was a woman.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The sound of the trumpets died away and Orlando stood stark naked. No human being, since the world began, has ever looked more ravishing. His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman's grace.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party — for what do they battle except their own prestige?”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing ...”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men — yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one. One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does no exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Society is the most powerful conception in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Thus, 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 (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But look — he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gesture one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation strikes and then another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “You are not listening to me. You are making phrases about Byron. And while you gesticulate, with your cloak, your cane, I am trying to expose a secret told to nobody yet; I am asking you (as I stand with my back to you) to take my life in your hands and tell me whether I am doomed always to cause repulsion in those I love?”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “For I am more selves than Neville thinks. We are not simple as our friends would have us to meet their needs. Yet love is simple.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then — our friends are not able to finish their stories.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “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 (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I like the copious, shapeless, warm, not so very clever, but extremely easy and rather coarse aspect of things; the talk of men in clubs and public-houses; of miners half naked in drawers — the forthright, perfectly unassuming, and without end in view except dinner, love, money and getting along tolerably; that which is without great hopes, ideals, or anything of that kind; what is unassuming except to make a tolerably, good job of it. I like all that.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “We have dined well. The fish, the veal cutlets, the wine have blunted the sharp tooth of egotism. Anxiety is at rest. The vainest of us, Louis perhaps, does not care what people think. Neville's tortures are at rest. Let others prosper — that is what he thinks. Susan hears the breathing of all her children safe asleep. Sleep, sleep, she murmurs. Rhoda has rocked her ships to shore. Whether they have foundered, whether they have anchored, she cares no longer.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “‘The flower,’ said Bernard, ‘the red carnation that stood in the vase on the table of the restaurant when we dined together with Percival, is become a six-sided flower; made of six lives.’”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Our friends, how seldom visited, how little known — it is true; and yet, when I meet an unknown person, and try to break off, here at this table, what I call “my life”, it is not one life that I look back upon; I am not one person; I am many people; I do not altogether know who I am — Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, or Louis; or how to distinguish my life from theirs.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Directly the mulberry tree begins to make you circle, break off. Pelt the tree with laughter.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Think we must.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Let us never cease from thinking—what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men?”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The outsider will say, "in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world." And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child's ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “... 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 (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “'That was the burden,' she mused, 'laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must rememeber; what we would forget.'”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning - wonderful words.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “They never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold. Why shut out the day before it was over? The flowers were still bright; the birds chirped. You could see more in the evening often when nothing interrupted, when there was no fish to order, no telephone to answer.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Mrs Swithin took her knitting from the table. 'Did you feel,' she asked, 'what he said: we act different parts but are the same?'”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The flowers flashed before they faded. She watched them flash.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The artist after all is a solitary being.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Lines slip easily down the accustomed grooves. The old designs are copied so glibly that we are half inclined to think them original, save for that very glibness.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Leaning Tower", lecture delivered to the Workers' Educational Association, Brighton (May 1940)

• “The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life ... it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence — of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “If, then, one should try to sum up the character of women's fiction at the present moment, one would say that it is courageous; it is sincere; it keeps closely to what women feel. It is not bitter. It does not insist upon its femininity.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In the past, the virtue of women's writing often lay in its divine spontaneity ... But it was also, and much more often, chattering and garrulous ... In future, granted time and books and a little space in the house for herself, literature will become for women, as for men, an art to be studied. Women's gift will be trained and strengthened. The novel will cease to be the dumping-ground for the personal emotions. It will become, more than at present, a work of art like any other, and its resources and its limitations will be explored.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly: it is perhaps a sign of their strength. But that Thoreau lost any of his own force in the process, or took on permanently any colours not natural to himself the readers of his books will certainly deny. The Transcendentalist movement, like most movements of vigour, represented the effort of one or two remarkable people to shake off the old clothes which had become uncomfortable to them and fit themselves more closely to what now appeared to them to be the realities.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “That great Cathedral space which was childhood.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) said by 1941 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Our patience wore rather thin. Visitors do tend to chafe one, though impeccable as friends. L. and I discussed this. He says that with people in the house his hours of positive pleasure are reduced to one; he has I forget how many hours of negative pleasure; and a respectable margin of the acutely unpleasant. Are we growing old?”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: 5 April 1918

• “Morgan has the artist's mind; he says the simple things that clever people don't say; I find him the best of critics for that reason. Suddenly out comes the obvious thing that one has overlooked.”

  Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: 6 November 1919

More