1,646 Quotes by Virginia Woolf

I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me

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?

Is it the lot of average human being, however, he asked himself, the criterion by which we judge the measure of civilization?

She was thinking how all those paths and the lawn, thick and knotted with the lives they had lived there, were gone: were rubbed out; were past; were unreal, and now this was real; the boat and the sail with its patch; Macalister with his earrings; the noise of the waves--all this was real.

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.

For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

For nothing [...] is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist.

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.