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

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing

I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again—as I always am when I write.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing

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

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: City Life, Cities

The mind is the most capricious of insects – flitting, fluttering.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Mind

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

The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Life

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

Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Friendship

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Idleness, Laziness

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing, Writing

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Women

Second-hand 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
Topics: Books

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

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Age

Most of a modest woman’s life was spent, after all, in denying what, in one day at least of every year, was made obvious.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Birth, Pregnancy

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: War

What could be more charming than a boy before he has begun to cultivate his intellect? He is beautiful to look at; he gives himself no airs; he understands the meaning of art and literature instinctively; he goes about enjoying his life and making other people enjoy theirs.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Youth

At 46 one must be a miser; only have time for essentials.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Aging, Age

To enjoy freedom, if the platitude is pardonable, we have of course to control ourselves. We must not squander our powers, helplessly and ignorantly, squirting half the house in order to water a single rose-bush; we must train them, exactly and powerfully, here on the very spot.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Freedom

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
Topics: Conformity

When an arguer argues dispassionately he thinks only of the argument.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Arguments

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

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

When a subject is highly controversial… one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Audiences

Young women… you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Women

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

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: Reading, Books, Literature

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

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