Tao Te Ching
George Charles Beresford
Virginia Woolf
1882 – 1941 CE
Stream of consciousness writing pioneer, one of the most influential 20th century writers, “the major lyrical novelist in the English language,” and “feminist inspiration;” Woolf struggled with mental illness all her life and yet wrote some of the era’s best short stories and novels, some translated into 50 languages. A deep influence on world culture, she promoted universal education, intellectual freedom, class equality, and feminism. Still popular today, the National Portrait Gallery in London sells more of her postcards than of any other. With a deep understanding of inner, psychological struggle, her characters expose the sacred within the ordinary, the profound in the midst of the commonplace.
Lineages
Artists British Humanism Poets Women of Wisdom
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Sources
Unlisted Sources
New Republic, 1940
Quotes by Virginia Woolf (59 quotes)
“When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, ...then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen”
Comments: Click to comment
“decorate the dungeon with flowers… As we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship, as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate do our part; mitigate the suffering of our fellow-prisoners”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“With twice his wits, she had to see things through his eyes—one of the tragedies of married life.”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“Did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her… somehow in the streets of London, on the ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“religious ecstasy made people callous as did causes; dulled their feelings”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“her look, passing through all that time and that emotion, reached him doubtfully; settled on him tearfully; and rose and fluttered away, as a bird touches a branch and rise and flutters away. Quote simply she wiped her eyes.”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing… taking away the sense of the earth”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“The solitary traveler is soon beyond the wood.”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“the power which adds the supreme floor to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly in the light”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“Beauty sprang instantly… it was made out of ordinary things… that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“She had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
Comments: Click to comment
“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
Comments: Click to comment
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
Comments: Click to comment
“What is the meaning of life?… The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman… I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.”
Comments: Click to comment
“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
Comments: Click to comment
“I will not be ‘famous,’ ‘great.’ I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped.”
Comments: Click to comment
“I worship you, but I loathe marriage. I hate its smugness, its safety, its compromise and the thought of you interfering with my work, hindering me; what would you answer?”
Comments: Click to comment
“I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”
Comments: Click to comment
“It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes makes its way to the surface.”
Comments: Click to comment
“And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”
Comments: Click to comment
Comments: Click to comment
“Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things.”
Comments: Click to comment
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
Comments: Click to comment
“No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Better to go unknown and leave behind an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.”
Comments: Click to comment
“when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.”
Comments: Click to comment
“I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by his heroism, virtue, and honor. I think the best these men can do is not talk about themselves anymore.”
Comments: Click to comment
“But to go deeper, beneath what people say—and their judgements, how superficial, how fragmentary they are!—what did it mean to her, this thing she called life?”
from Mrs. Dalloway
Comments: Click to comment
“Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster.”
Comments: Click to comment
“If it meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue, then she would turn about with the ship and set sail once more for the gypsies.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“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, the future on another.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice… what could be more secret, more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers?”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“The thought struck him like a bullet. Ambition dropped like a plummet. Rid of the heart-burn of rejected love and all the other stings and pricks of life’s nettle-bed his ambitions had burnt upon him, he opened his eyes which had been wide open all the time but had seen only thoughts.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a person like a mist. Dark, ample and free, obscurity lets the mind make its way unimpeded. They alone are free, they alone are truthful, they alone are at peace.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“Those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why; the tribe of respectable who prefer not to see… This is no place for us here.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“Nothing can be more arrogant, though nothing is commoner than to assume that of Gods there is only one, and of religions none but the speaker's.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“A silly song of Shakespeare’s has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“The ear is the antechamber to the soul and poetry can adulterate more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet’s then is the highest office of all, His words reach where others fall short”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our message less distorting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts [and] Thoughts are divine.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? If one liked other people, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had her doubts.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“She could feel herself poisoned through and through, and was forced at length to consider the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“the words went dancing and circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher, further and further, faster and faster, they circled, till they crashed and fell in a shower of fragments to the ground”
from Orlando: A Biography
Comments: Click to comment
“[Wollstonecraft's] writing, arguments, and experiments in living are immortal: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Blake wrote, "I will not cease from mental flight." Mental flight means thinking against the current, not with it. And the current flows fast and furious. It issues a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians.”
from New Republic, 1940
Comments: Click to comment
Comments: Click to comment
“Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ... we have his works here, and I read, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale. Is there really any sense in it?"”
Comments: Click to comment
“Nothing has really happened until it's been described.”
Comments: Click to comment
“The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.”
Comments: Click to comment
“Oh if I could write like that!”
Comments: Click to comment
“one of the few English novels written for grown-up people [Middlemarch]”
Comments: Click to comment
Quotes about Virginia Woolf (1 quotes)
“The only other person I have met who talked as he [Pasternak] talked was Virginia Woolf, who made one's mind race as he did, and obliterated one's normal vision of reality in the same exhilarating and, at times, terrifying way.”
Comments: Click to comment
Comments (0)