Quotes from Virginia Woolf

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

But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.

I will not be "famous," "great." I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one's self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.

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?

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

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.

That complete statement which is literature.

Melancholy were the sounds on a winter's night.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

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.

Never are voices so beautiful as on a winter's evening, when dusk almost hides the body, and they seem to issue from nothingness with a note of intimacy seldom heard by day.

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.

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.

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

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

A biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.

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?

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

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

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.

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