Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 to a prominent family in London. From an early age, she showed a talent for writing and was heavily influenced by the Victorian era’s focus on self-improvement. Woolf became one of the most acclaimed writers of her time, publishing novels, essays and criticism that explored the human experience with depth and intelligence. Her words are still relevant today, offering insight into everything from the creative process to mental health.
Woolf was not only an accomplished author, but also a keen observer of the human condition. A chance encounter with a quote from Virginia Woolf can send you down a rabbit hole of thought.
Here are some of our favorite Virginia Woolf quotes to get your mind churning.
Virginia Woolf Quotes
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.
Virginia Woolf
All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.
Virginia Woolf
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.
Virginia Woolf
Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.
Virginia Woolf
One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see.
Virginia Woolf
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Virginia Woolf
A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.
Virginia Woolf
A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.
Virginia Woolf
The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.
Virginia Woolf
Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.
Virginia Woolf
Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle – for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being; rigidity is death; conformity is death; let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.
Virginia Woolf
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
Virginia Woolf
Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.
Virginia Woolf
I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.
Virginia Woolf
In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
Virginia Woolf
A light here required a shadow there.
Virginia Woolf
Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.
Virginia Woolf
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.
Virginia Woolf
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
Virginia Woolf
But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful.
Virginia Woolf
Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Virginia Woolf
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
Virginia Woolf
The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
Virginia Woolf
I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.
Virginia Woolf
I’m terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.
Virginia Woolf
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
Virginia Woolf
Intimacy is a difficult art.
Virginia Woolf
I am extremely happy walking on the downs…I like to have space to spread my mind out in.
Virginia Woolf
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.
Virginia Woolf
One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
Virginia Woolf
The beauty of the world…has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Virginia Woolf
Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf
The only advice…that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
Virginia Woolf
As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
Virginia Woolf
There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.
Virginia Woolf
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
Virginia Woolf
If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sense. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.
Virginia Woolf
I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.
Virginia Woolf
How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?
Virginia Woolf
It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.
Virginia Woolf
I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.
Virginia Woolf
I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.
Virginia Woolf
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Virginia Woolf
I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.
Virginia Woolf
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
Virginia Woolf
For now she need not think of anybody. She coud be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
Virginia Woolf
Language is wine upon the lips.
Virginia Woolf
She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.
Virginia Woolf
I exist only in the soles of my feet and in the tired muscles of my thighs. We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember.
Virginia Woolf
I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.
Virginia Woolf
A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.
Virginia Woolf
They went in and out of each other’s minds without any effort.
Virginia Woolf
Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.
Virginia Woolf
A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
Virginia Woolf
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Virginia Woolf
I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.
Virginia Woolf
As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.
Virginia Woolf
For nothing was simply one thing.
Virginia Woolf
As long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.
Virginia Woolf
For it would seem—her case proved it—that we write, not with the fingers but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fiber of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.
Virginia Woolf
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
Virginia Woolf
It may be possible that the world itself is without meaning.
Virginia Woolf
For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.
Virginia Woolf
Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.
Virginia Woolf
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.
Virginia Woolf
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
Virginia Woolf
When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.
Virginia Woolf
Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
Virginia Woolf
Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
Virginia Woolf
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Virginia Woolf
Why are women…so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf
Love, the poet said, is woman’s whole existence.
Virginia Woolf
I have lost friends, some by death…others by sheer inability to cross the street.
Virginia Woolf
To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face, and to know it for what it is… at last, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away…
Virginia Woolf
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
Virginia Woolf
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.
Virginia Woolf
They can because they think they can.
Virginia Woolf
I worship you but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?
Virginia Woolf
I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.
Virginia Woolf
To love makes one solitary.
Virginia Woolf
Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.
Virginia Woolf
For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self, having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.
Virginia Woolf
Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
Virginia Woolf
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?
Virginia Woolf
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
Virginia Woolf
As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.
Virginia Woolf
A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgement, solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinions, admires her understanding, or will refuse though the rapier is denied him, to run through the body with his pen.
Virginia Woolf
The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Virginia Woolf
I really don’t advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.
Virginia Woolf
The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Virginia Woolf
I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.
Virginia Woolf
Anything can happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.
Virginia Woolf
There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, ‘consume me.
Virginia Woolf
Nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy.
Virginia Woolf
I am rooted but I flow.
Virginia Woolf
I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought hot it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.
Virginia Woolf
Parting Words
Virginia Woolf’s work is timeless for a reason. She was able to capture the essence of the human experience in her writing and offer insightful commentary on life, thought, and the creative process. Her words are as relevant now as they were when she first penned them, and they will continue to be appreciated for generations to come.
What’s your favorite quote from Virginia Woolf? Let us know in the comments.
P.S. You might also like these related quote collections:
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Originally Published: November 2, 2022
✍️ Lima, Peru
