“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.”
Best
“If one could be friendly with women, what a pleasure - the relationship so secret and private compared with relations with men. Why not write about it truthfully?”
RelationshipAll Quotes by Virginia Woolf
“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”
Men“When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.”
Amazing“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.”
Experience“Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say.”
Truth“I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.”
God“The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
Beauty“Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.”
Experience“Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.”
Power“The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.”
Romantic“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.”
Dreams“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?”
Education“It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.”
Nature“Yet, it is true, poetry is delicious the best prose is that which is most full of poetry.”
Best“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
Peace“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”
History“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.”
Happiness“Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.”
Business“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”
Alone“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.”
Time