Top 86 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

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.

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.

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

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

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?

The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.

Thought and theory must precede all salutary action; yet action is nobler in itself than either thought or theory.

Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?

Every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.