Virginia Woolf

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.

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

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

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.