Top 90 Vita Sackville-West Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A man and his tools make a man and his trade.”

— Vita Sackville-West

2. “What is beautiful is good, and who is good will soon be beautiful.”

— Vita Sackville-West

3. “All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have heldReality down fluttering to a bench.”

— Vita Sackville-West

4. “The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.”

— Vita Sackville-West

5. “Serenity of spirit and turbulence of action should make up the sum of a man’s life.”

— Vita Sackville-West

6. “I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal.”

— Vita Sackville-West

7. “Small pleasures must correct great tragedies, therefore of gardens in the midst of war I bold tell.”

— Vita Sackville-West

8. “I suppose the pleasure of country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live.”

— Vita Sackville-West

9. “I worshipped dead men for their strength, Forgetting I was strong.”

— Vita Sackville-West

10. “Still, no gardener would be a gardener if he did not live in hope.”

— Vita Sackville-West

11. “To hope for Paradise is to live in Paradise, a very different thing from actually getting there.”

— Vita Sackville-West

12. “There are no signposts in the sea.”

— Vita Sackville-West

13. “A good start in life is as important to plants as it is to children: they must develop strong roots in a congenial soil, otherwise they will never make the growth that will serve them richly according to their needs in their adult life.”

— Vita Sackville-West

14. “A flowerless room is a soulless room, to my way of thinking; but even a solitary little vase of a living flower may redeem it.”

— Vita Sackville-West

15. “Forget not bees in winter, though they sleep.”

— Vita Sackville-West

16. “Not seeing is half-believing.”

— Vita Sackville-West

17. “Travel is in sad case. It is uncomfortable, it is expensive; it is a source of annoyance to our friends, and of loneliness to ourselves.”

— Vita Sackville-West

18. “Women, like men, ought to have their years so glutted with freedom that they hate the very idea of freedom.”

— Vita Sackville-West

19. “Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong.”

— Vita Sackville-West

20. “The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.”

— Vita Sackville-West

21. “Flowers really do intoxicate me.”

— Vita Sackville-West

22. “There is always something else to do. A gardener should have nine times as many lives as a cat.”

— Vita Sackville-West

23. “I like muddling things up; and if a herb looks nice in a border, then why not grow it there? Why not grow anything anywhere so long as it looks right where it is? That is, surely, the art of gardening.”

— Vita Sackville-West

24. “Successful gardening is not necessarily a question of wealth, it is a question of love, taste, and knowledge.”

— Vita Sackville-West

25. “Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming.”

— Vita Sackville-West

26. “I think we have got something indestructible between us, haven’t we?”

— Vita Sackville-West

27. “Lovers, or potential lovers, ought never to meet before the afternoon.”

— Vita Sackville-West

28. “She loves in a way that will make her suffer horribly.”

— Vita Sackville-West

29. “Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude.”

— Vita Sackville-West

30. “April, the angel of the months, the young love of the year.”

— Vita Sackville-West

31. “I don’t know what to say to you expect that it tore my heart out of my body saying goodbye to you.”

— Vita Sackville-West

32. “Ambition, old as mankind, the immemorial weakness of the strong.”

— Vita Sackville-West

Featured in: Self Control Quotes

33. “I loved you when love was Spring, and May, Loved you when summer deepened into June, and now when autumn yellows all the leaves...”

— Vita Sackville-West

34. “I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.”

— Vita Sackville-West

35. “Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery. – Vita Sackville-West.”

— Vita Sackville-West

36. “Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.”

— Vita Sackville-West

37. “There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree.”

— Vita Sackville-West

38. “The Saluki is a marvel of elegance.”

— Vita Sackville-West

39. “Click, clack, click, clack, went their conversation, like so many knitting-needles, purl, plain, purl, plain, achieving a complex pattern of references, cross-references, Christian names, nicknames, and fleeting allusions.”

— Vita Sackville-West

40. “It is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.”

— Vita Sackville-West

41. “Tools have their own integrity...”

— Vita Sackville-West

42. “She wondered which wounds went deeper: the jagged wounds of reality, or the profound invisible bruises of the imagination?”

— Vita Sackville-West

43. “It isn’t that I don’t like sweet disorder, but it has to be judiciously arranged.”

— Vita Sackville-West

44. “Summer makes a silence after spring.”

— Vita Sackville-West

45. “Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.”

— Vita Sackville-West

46. “Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irrespective of size or wealth.”

— Vita Sackville-West

47. “For the last 40 years of my life I have broken my back, my fingernails, and sometimes my heart, in the practical pursuit of my favourite occupation.”

— Vita Sackville-West

48. “Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.”

— Vita Sackville-West

49. “I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.”

— Vita Sackville-West

50. “Of course I should love to throw a toothbrush into a bag, and just go, quite vaguely, without any plans or even a real destination. It is the Wanderlust.”

— Vita Sackville-West