Virginia Woolf Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von Virginia Woolf:

Great bodies of people are never responsible for what they do.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

Virginia Woolf

One has to secrete a jelly in which to slip quotations down people's throats - and one always secretes too much jelly.

Virginia Woolf

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it's there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Virginia Woolf

Boredom is the legitimate kingdom of the philanthropic.

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

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.

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

Language is wine upon the lips.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Virginia Woolf

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

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

If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or 'our' country, let it be understood soberly and rationally between us that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits where I have not shared and probably will not share.

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

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

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

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

You cannot find peace by avoiding life.

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

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

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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?

Virginia Woolf

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

Virginia Woolf

That great Cathedral space which was childhood.

Virginia Woolf

I want the concentration and the romance, and the worlds all glued together, fused, glowing: have no time to waste any more on prose.

Virginia Woolf

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

Virginia Woolf

Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

Virginia Woolf

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

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

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Virginia Woolf

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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

Virginia Woolf

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.

Virginia Woolf