Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I am rooted, but I flow.”

— Virginia Woolf

2. “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Deep Quotes About Life, Motivational Quotes About Life, Peace Quotes, Thought Provoking Quotes

3. “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Self-Esteem Quotes, Self-Worth Quotes, Focus On Yourself Quotes, Acceptance Quotes, Self-Belief Quotes

4. “Books are the mirrors of the soul.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Deep Quotes, Intelligent Quotes, Soul Quotes

5. “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes for Women, International Women's Day Quotes

6. “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

Featured in: Creativity Quotes, Mindset Quotes, Quotes About Thinking, Quotes About Writing, Knowledge Quotes

7. “Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.”

— Virginia Woolf

8. “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”

— Virginia Woolf

9. “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

— Virginia Woolf

10. “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

Featured in: Fiction Quotes, Quotes About Writing, Creative Quotes, Soul Quotes

11. “Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.”

— Virginia Woolf

12. “I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Love You Quotes, Romantic Quotes, Couple Quotes, Quotes About Reality

13. “Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

14. “Thinking is my fighting.”

— Virginia Woolf

15. “A light here required a shadow there.”

— Virginia Woolf

16. “It’s my choice, to choose how to live my life.”

— Virginia Woolf

17. “I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.”

— Virginia Woolf

18. “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

19. “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Identity Quotes, Honesty Quotes

20. “What does the brain matter compared with the heart?”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Empathy Quotes, Romantic Quotes

21. “The eyes of others are our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Confidence Quotes

22. “Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.”

— Virginia Woolf

23. “Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Cute Quotes, Romantic Quotes, Longing Quotes, Thinking of You Quotes

24. “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

25. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Health Quotes

26. “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Desire Quotes, Longing Quotes

27. “Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.”

— Virginia Woolf

28. “My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Quotes About the Brain

29. “I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.”

— Virginia Woolf

30. “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

31. “Language is wine upon the lips.”

— Virginia Woolf

32. “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Creative Quotes

33. “As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Women Empowerment Quotes, Country Quotes

34. “The way to write well is to live intensely.”

— Virginia Woolf

35. “Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.”

— Virginia Woolf

36. “Without self awareness we are as babies in the cradles.”

— Virginia Woolf

37. “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

— Virginia Woolf

38. “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.”

— Virginia Woolf

39. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

— Virginia Woolf

40. “Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One’s Mind about Another Person.”

— Virginia Woolf

41. “I’m terrified of passive acquiescence. I live in intensity.”

— Virginia Woolf

42. “My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”

— Virginia Woolf

Featured in: Quotes About the Brain

43. “The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.”

— Virginia Woolf

44. “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.”

— Virginia Woolf

45. “Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things. Still, life had a way of adding day to day.”

— Virginia Woolf

46. “Fear no more, says the heart...”

— Virginia Woolf

47. “People ask me why I write. I write to find out what I know.”

— Virginia Woolf

48. “The streets of London have their map, but our passions are uncharted. What are you going to meet if you turn this corner?”

— Virginia Woolf

49. “They can because they think they can.”

— Virginia Woolf

50. “Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.”

— Virginia Woolf