The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

Virginia Woolf

I really don’t advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married.

Virginia Woolf

Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.

Virginia Woolf

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

Virginia Woolf

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

Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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

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

Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.

Virginia Woolf

It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Virginia Woolf

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Virginia Woolf

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

Virginia Woolf

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

Virginia Woolf

It seems as if an age of genius must be succeeded by an age of endeavour; riot and extravagance by cleanliness and hard work.

Virginia Woolf

Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?

Virginia Woolf

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

Virginia Woolf

Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.

Virginia Woolf

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Virginia Woolf

I am in the mood to dissolve in the sky.

Virginia Woolf

Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

Virginia Woolf

Why are women … so much more interesting to men than men are to women?

Virginia Woolf

Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.

Virginia Woolf

The beautiful seems right by force of beauty, and the feeble wrong because of weakness.

Virginia Woolf

If we help an educated man’s daughter to go to Cambridge are we not forcing her to think not about education but about war? – not how she can learn, but how she can fight in order that she might win the same advantages as her brothers?

Virginia Woolf

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

Virginia Woolf