Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Virginia Woolf (English Novelist)

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941,) born Adeline Virginia Stephen, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. She made her mark not only as a modernist writer but also as one of the foremost feminist intellectuals of the twentieth century. Her nonlinear approaches to narrative exerted a significant influence on the genre.

Born in London to the famous Victorian scholar Leslie Stephen, Woolf was educated at home and, in 1913, married Leonard Woolf, writer, and publisher of The Hogarth Press. In spite of recurrent bouts of acute mental depression and failing health, Woolf persevered to write a large output of essays, reviews, and novels. She founded the Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists, critics, and writers that included economist John Maynard Keynes, biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist E. M. Forster, painter Duncan Grant, and critic Roger Fry.

Wolfe gained recognition with Jacob’s Room (1922,) Mrs Dalloway (1925,) To the Lighthouse (1927,) and Orlando (1928.) These are written in her innovative narrative technique in which the conventional storyline is replaced by an emphasis on the inner, psychological states of Woolf’s characters.

Wolfe’s A Room of One’s Own (1929,) a survey of the difficulties confronting women, became a landmark of feminist literature. Her critical essays, including Modern Novels (1919) and The Common Reader (1925,) are now considered indispensable to modernist literary theory.

Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse in Sussex during a protracted bout of depression caused by the outbreak of war in 1941.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Virginia Woolf

Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Fiction, Authors & Writing

For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Public

Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Humankind, Sex

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.
—Virginia Woolf

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.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Peace

Humor is the first gift to perish in a foreign language.
—Virginia Woolf

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.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Winter

By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
—Virginia Woolf

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Childhood, Youth

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
Topics: Men & Women, Men and Women, Men, Nature, Women

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Romance

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Books, Literature, Reading

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Apathy

Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Order

As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Women

These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Age

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Boredom

Life for both sexes is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. More than anything… it calls for confidence in oneself…And how can we generate this imponderable quality most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Confidence

To write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heartbreaking task for men who know good writing from bad.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Journalism

In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Solitude, Memories

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Truth, Honesty

It will be all over this day week – comfort – discomfort; and the zest and rush that no engagements, hours, habits give. Then we shall take them up again with more than the zest of traveling.
—Virginia Woolf

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Human Nature, Humanity

The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gas mask handy, it is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Prosperity, Propaganda

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Poetry

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Legacy, Biography

The first duty of a lecturer is to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece forever.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Education, Teachers, Teaching

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Food, Miscellaneous, Poverty

We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey! The phantom is through the mind and out of the window before we can lay salt on
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Thought, Thoughts

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