Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.”

— Virginia Woolf

52. “Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.”

— Virginia Woolf

53. “Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes. Any help we can give you must be different from that you can give yourselves, and perhaps the value of that help may lie in the fact of that difference.”

— Virginia Woolf

54. “Consolation for those moments when you can’t tell whether you’re the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”

— Virginia Woolf

55. “In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.”

— Virginia Woolf

56. “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realises 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

57. “A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.”

— Virginia Woolf

58. “I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”

— Virginia Woolf

59. “Illness is a part of every human being’s experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals.”

— Virginia Woolf

60. “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

61. “One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.”

— Virginia Woolf

62. “Semua orang ingin hidup bahagia. Kadang-kadang kita sendiri yang mempersulit keadaan untuk menjadi bahagia.”

— Virginia Woolf

63. “The weather varies between heavy fog and pale sunshine; My thoughts follow the exact same process.”

— Virginia Woolf

64. “I will cut adrift – I will sit on pavements and drink coffee – I will dream; I will take my mind out of its iron cage and let it swim – this fine October.”

— Virginia Woolf

65. “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

66. “Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”

— Virginia Woolf

67. “Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves came the voices of birds singing.”

— Virginia Woolf

68. “Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.”

— Virginia Woolf

69. “Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.”

— Virginia Woolf

70. “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

71. “Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in it’s place?”

— Virginia Woolf

72. “Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall.”

— Virginia Woolf

73. “What a comfort is friendship in this world.”

— Virginia Woolf

74. “And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”

— Virginia Woolf

75. “So 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

76. “All extremes of feeling are allied with madness.”

— Virginia Woolf

77. “One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one’s words.”

— Virginia Woolf

78. “The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.”

— Virginia Woolf

79. “I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”

— Virginia Woolf

80. “There is a sadness at the back of life which some people do not attempt to mitigate. Entirely aware of their own standing in the shadow, and yet alive to every tremor and gleam of existence, there they endure.”

— Virginia Woolf

81. “Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.”

— Virginia Woolf

82. “Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.”

— Virginia Woolf

83. “As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”

— Virginia Woolf

84. “To be nothing – is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?”

— Virginia Woolf

85. “I like to have space to spread my mind out in.”

— Virginia Woolf

86. “I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.”

— Virginia Woolf

87. “I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.”

— Virginia Woolf

88. “But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force her mind to become a blank and lie back, and accept quietly, tolerantly, whatever came.”

— Virginia Woolf

89. “Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.”

— Virginia Woolf

90. “These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.”

— Virginia Woolf

91. “The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”

— Virginia Woolf

92. “It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.”

— Virginia Woolf

93. “Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.”

— Virginia Woolf

94. “The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely imaging.”

— Virginia Woolf

95. “It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.”

— Virginia Woolf

96. “We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

— Virginia Woolf

97. “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”

— Virginia Woolf

98. “I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.”

— Virginia Woolf

99. “I will go down with my colors flying.”

— Virginia Woolf

100. “Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”

— Virginia Woolf