Top 500 Virginia Woolf Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan’t recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer.”

— Virginia Woolf

402. “There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them.”

— Virginia Woolf

403. “They had been written in the red light of emotion and not in the white light of truth.”

— Virginia Woolf

404. “Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair – He took her bag.”

— Virginia Woolf

405. “It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that.”

— Virginia Woolf

406. “Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do?”

— Virginia Woolf

407. “Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!”

— Virginia Woolf

408. “I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.”

— Virginia Woolf

409. “Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.”

— Virginia Woolf

410. “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? – startling, unexpected, unknown?”

— Virginia Woolf

411. “Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen;.”

— Virginia Woolf

412. “I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me.”

— Virginia Woolf

413. “I am volatile for one, rigid for another, angular as an icicle in silver, or voluptuous as a candle flame in gold.”

— Virginia Woolf

414. “To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination.”

— Virginia Woolf

415. “If we didn’t live venturously, plucking the wild goat by the beard, and trembling over precipices, we should never be depressed, I’ve no doubt; but already should be faded, fatalistic and aged.”

— Virginia Woolf

416. “Mr. Oscar Browning was a great figure in Cambridge at one time, and used to examine the students at Girton and Newnham. Mr. Oscar Browning was wont to declare “that the impression left on his mind, after looking over any set of examination papers, was that, irrespective of the marks he might give, the best woman was intellectually the inferior of the worst man.”

— Virginia Woolf

417. “To depend upon a profession is a less odious form of slavery than to depend upon a father.”

— Virginia Woolf

418. “Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.”

— Virginia Woolf

419. “She was the most beautiful person he had ever seen. With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets.”

— Virginia Woolf

420. “When the body escaped mutilation, seldom did the heart go to the grave unscarred.”

— Virginia Woolf

421. “It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels.”

— Virginia Woolf

422. “What I value is the naked contact of a mind.”

— Virginia Woolf

423. “Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has any special sympathy with women; a mind that takes up their cause or devotes itself to their interpretation. Perhaps the androgynous mind is less apt to make these distinctions than the single-sexed mind. He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”

— Virginia Woolf

424. “There is something about the present which we would not exchange, though we were offered a choice of all past ages to live in.”

— Virginia Woolf

425. “I condemn you. Yet my heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am happiest alone.”

— Virginia Woolf

426. “It is the privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw.”

— Virginia Woolf

427. “The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”

— Virginia Woolf

428. “To want and not to have, sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have- to want and want- how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again!”

— Virginia Woolf

429. “I prefer men to cauliflowers.”

— Virginia Woolf

430. “Her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit.”

— Virginia Woolf

431. “Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.”

— Virginia Woolf

432. “After that, how unbelievable death was! – that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all.”

— Virginia Woolf

433. “Why have I so little control? It is the case of much waste and pain in my life.”

— Virginia Woolf

434. “No, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.”

— Virginia Woolf

435. “Boys in uniform, carrying guns, marched with their eyes ahead of them, marched, their arms stiff, and on their faces an expression like the letters of a legend written round the base of a statue praising duty, gratitude, fidelity, love of England.”

— Virginia Woolf

436. “If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today? Does the progress of civilization depend upon great men? Is the lot of the average human being better now that in the time of the Pharaohs?”

— Virginia Woolf

437. “The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings.”

— Virginia Woolf

438. “Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.”

— Virginia Woolf

439. “And it was awfully strange, he thought, how she still had the power, as she came tinkling, rustling, still had the power as she came across the room, to make the moon, which he detested, rise at Bourton on the terrace in the summer sky.”

— Virginia Woolf

440. “There are moments when one can neither think nor feel, she thought, and if one can neithre feel nor think, where’s one?”

— Virginia Woolf

441. “This I say is the present moment; this is the first day of the summer holidays. This is part of the emerging monster to whom we are attached.”

— Virginia Woolf

442. “These moments of escape are not to be despised. They come too seldom.”

— Virginia Woolf

443. “If this were the time or the place to uphold a paradox, I am half inclined to state that Norfolk is one of the most beautiful of counties.”

— Virginia Woolf

444. “But I beneath a rougher sea, And whelmed in deeper gulfs than he.”

— Virginia Woolf

445. “With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes – one of the tragedies of married life.”

— Virginia Woolf

446. “Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action.”

— Virginia Woolf

447. “Gli occhi degli altri sono le nostre prigioni, i loro pensieri le nostre gabbie.”

— Virginia Woolf

448. “I would never re-write you. You are by far my most complete and greatest novel.”

— Virginia Woolf

449. “I should like to tidy things up and disappear.”

— Virginia Woolf

450. “She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness.”

— Virginia Woolf