Quotes from Leonard Woolf

There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.

The mere fact that a very large number of people believe such a thing and that the world would be a better place if it were true, is no reason for believing that it is true.

You can't love by desiring an extremely vague desire of a very vague moon.

Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.

Nothing matters. You get yourself into a state in which you imagine things which have no basis in reality... One begins for some reason to worry about something and, if one allows oneself to go on doing that, one gradually imagines all kinds of things. It is a kind of self-indulgence and one gets into a perpetual daydream. It is essential to stop this process and face the real world -- which is never so bad as all that.

Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting room window: "Hitler is making a speech." I shouted back, "I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.

They say: 'Come to tea and let us comfort you.' But it's no good. One must be crucified on one's own private cross. I know that V. will not come across the garden from the lodge, & yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned & yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page & yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one's stupidity & selfishness.

One must be crucified on one's own private cross.

You can't love by desiring an extremely vague desire of a very vague moon.

The violent but narrow passions that pass under the name of patriotism are not the noblest forms of human and social emotions. The world, or the people who, unfortunately, have most to say in governing the world, believe no such thing, and will not believe it when the representatives of States meet again to decide how to fill up the graves which they helped dig in Europe.

It is just as easy to use a good principle for bad ends as it is to use a bad principle for good ends.

Nothing matters.

The idea is more horny on paper than in practice.

The mere fact that a very large number of people believe such a thing and that the world would be a better place if it were true, is no reason for believing that it is true.

There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.

It is never right for any individual or government to do any vast evil as a means to some hypothetical good.

The fact is, I find it extremely difficult to force myself to read old letters... Whenever one really knows the facts, one finds that what is accepted by contemporaries or posterity as the truth about them is so distorted or out of focus that it is not worth worrying about.

Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.

I see clearly that I have achieved practically nothing.

Nothing matters, and everything matters.

I believe profoundly in two rules. Justice and mercy – they seem to me the foundation of all civilized life and society, if you include under mercy, toleration.