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

The older one grows, the more one likes indecency.
Virginia Woolf

The poet gives us his essence, but prose takes the mold of the body and mind.
Virginia Woolf

The telephone, which interrupts the most serious conversations and cuts short the most weighty observations, has a romance of its own.
Virginia Woolf

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
Virginia Woolf

There can be no two opinions as to what a highbrow is. He is the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea.
Virginia Woolf

There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
Virginia Woolf

These are the soul's changes. I don't believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one's aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.
Virginia Woolf

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Virginia Woolf

This is not writing at all. Indeed, I could say that Shakespeare surpasses literature altogether, if I knew what I meant.
Virginia Woolf

This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
Virginia Woolf

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

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

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
Virginia Woolf

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
Virginia Woolf

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.
Virginia Woolf

When the shriveled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning, it satisfies the senses amazingly.
Virginia Woolf

Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
Virginia Woolf

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

Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
Virginia Woolf