Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.”

— Virginia Woolf

102. “How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?”

— Virginia Woolf

103. “It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.”

— Virginia Woolf

104. “If you are losing your leisure, look out! – It may be you are losing your soul.”

— Virginia Woolf

105. “Literature is no one’s private ground, literature is common ground; let us trespass freely and fearlessly and find our own way for ourselves.”

— Virginia Woolf

106. “They say the sky is the same everywhere. Travellers, the shipwrecked, exiles, and the dying draw comfort from the thought.”

— Virginia Woolf

107. “Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends.”

— Virginia Woolf

108. “First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air.”

— Virginia Woolf

109. “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.”

— Virginia Woolf

110. “But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.”

— Virginia Woolf

111. “I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honour. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.”

— Virginia Woolf

112. “How remorseless life is!”

— Virginia Woolf

113. “In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows.”

— Virginia Woolf

114. “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

115. “What a lark! What a plunge!”

— Virginia Woolf

116. “Did it matter then, she asked herself, walking towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely? All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?”

— Virginia Woolf

117. “Lord, how tired one gets of one’s own writing.”

— Virginia Woolf

118. “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.”

— Virginia Woolf

119. “The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

— Virginia Woolf

120. “Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are.”

— Virginia Woolf

121. “I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.”

— Virginia Woolf

122. “Madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.”

— Virginia Woolf

123. “Like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life.”

— Virginia Woolf

124. “Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigues, I have had my vision.”

— Virginia Woolf

125. “My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child–wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.”

— Virginia Woolf

126. “But I don’t think of the future, or the past, I feast on the moment. This is the secret of happiness, but only reached now in middle age.”

— Virginia Woolf

127. “Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”

— Virginia Woolf

128. “Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.”

— Virginia Woolf

129. “Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious; the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”

— Virginia Woolf

130. “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

131. “For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.”

— Virginia Woolf

132. “Am I too fast, too facile? I do not know. I do not know myself sometimes, or how to measure and name and count out the grains that make me what I am.”

— Virginia Woolf

133. “My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.”

— Virginia Woolf

134. “There is the strange power we have of changing facts by the force of the imagination.”

— Virginia Woolf

135. “It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”

— Virginia Woolf

136. “The artist after all is a solitary being.”

— Virginia Woolf

137. “The immense success of our life is, I think, that our treasure is hid away; or rather in such common things that nothing can touch it.”

— Virginia Woolf

138. “I feel certain that I’m going mad again, I feel we can’t go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices.”

— Virginia Woolf

139. “I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing that way.”

— Virginia Woolf

140. “War is not women’s history.”

— Virginia Woolf

141. “Melancholy were the sounds on a winter’s night.”

— Virginia Woolf

142. “The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”

— Virginia Woolf

143. “Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”

— Virginia Woolf

144. “And yet, the only exciting life is the imaginary one.”

— Virginia Woolf

145. “The depths of the sea are only water after all.”

— Virginia Woolf

146. “The history of most women is hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.”

— Virginia Woolf

147. “The mind is the most capricious of insects – flitting, fluttering.”

— Virginia Woolf

148. “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.”

— Virginia Woolf

149. “Cierra con llave tus bibliotecas, si quieres, pero no hay barrera, cerradura, ni cerrojo que puedas imponer a la libertad de mi mente.”

— Virginia Woolf

150. “One must learn to be silent just as one must learn to talk.”

— Virginia Woolf