Quotes from Virginia Woolf

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?

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.

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.

Truth had run through my fingers. Every drop had escaped.

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.

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

For there is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power. Like radium, it seems to give off forever and ever grains of energy, atoms of light.

After all, what is a lovely phrase? One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

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

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

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

Oh, I am in love with life!

I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.

How are we to account for the strange human craving for the pleasure of feeling afraid which is so much involved in our love of ghost stories?

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

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.

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

Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?

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

The great cathedral space which was childhood.

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

We scarcely wish to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.

There is something I want-something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed.