Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child in a blended family of eight which included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. Her mother was Julia Prinsep Jackson and her father Leslie Stephen. While the boys in the family received college educations, the girls were home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature. An important influence in Virginia Woolf’s early life was the summer home the family used in St Ives, Cornwall, where, in the late 1890s, she first saw the Godrevy Lighthouse, which was to become central to her novel To the Lighthouse (1927). Woolf’s childhood came to an abrupt end in 1895 with the death of her mother and her first mental breakdown, followed two years later by the death of her half-sister and a mother figure to her, Stella Duckworth. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women’s higher education and the women’s rights movement. Other important influences were her Cambridge-educated brothers and unfettered access to her father’s vast library. Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. Her father’s death in 1904 caused Woolf to have another mental breakdown. Following his death, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where they adopted a free-spirited lifestyle. It was in Bloomsbury where, in conjunction with the brothers’ intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. May these Virginia Woolf Quotes On Success inspire you to take action so that you may live your dreams.
1. “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” Virginia Woolf
2. “I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river, to me you’re everything that exists, the reality of everything.” Virginia Woolf
3. “All extremes of feeling are allied to madness.” Virginia Woolf
4. “Just in case you ever foolishly forget, I’m never not thinking of you.” Virginia Woolf
5. “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.” Virginia Woolf
6. “A perfect treat must include a trip to a second-hand bookshop.” Virginia Woolf
7. “Be truthful, and the result is bound to be amazingly interesting.” Virginia Woolf
8. “As a woman I have no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” Virginia Woolf
9. “I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.” Virginia Woolf
10. “Never pretend that the things you haven’t got are not worth having.” Virginia Woolf
11. “In solitude we give passionate attention to our lives, to our memories, to the details around us.” Virginia Woolf
12. “How many times have people used a pen or paintbrush because they couldn’t pull the trigger?” Virginia Woolf
13. “Intimacy is a difficult art.” Virginia Woolf
14. “A self that goes on changing is a self that goes on living.” Virginia Woolf
15. “The way to write well is to live intensely.” Virginia Woolf
16. “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.” Virginia Woolf
17. “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
18. “But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb, the self that took the veil and left the world — a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.” Virginia Woolf
19. “The eyes of others our prisons, their thoughts our cages.” Virginia Woolf
20. “A light here required a shadow there.” Virginia Woolf
21. “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.” Virginia Woolf
22. “Style is a very simple matter, it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.” Virginia Woolf
23. “A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life.” Virginia Woolf
24. “If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their sense. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. Humanity goes. Money making becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.” Virginia Woolf
25. “No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” Virginia Woolf
26. “Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.” Virginia Woolf
27. “Let us simmer over our incalculable cauldron, our enthralling confusion, our hotchpotch of impulses, our perpetual miracle – for the soul throws up wonders every second. Movement and change are the essence of our being, rigidity is death, conformity is death, let us say what comes into our heads, repeat ourselves, contradict ourselves, fling out the wildest nonsense, and follow the most fantastic fancies without caring what the world does or thinks or says. For nothing matters except life.” Virginia Woolf
28. “I am rooted, but I flow.” Virginia Woolf
29. “You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” Virginia Woolf
30. “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.” Virginia Woolf
31. “I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out, and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.” Virginia Woolf
32. “Praise and blame alike mean nothing. No, delightful as the pastime of measuring may be, it is the most futile of all occupations, and to submit to the decrees of the measurers the most servile of attitudes.” Virginia Woolf
33. “Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.” Virginia Woolf
34. “Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself.” Virginia Woolf
35. “Distorted realities have always been my cup of tea.” Virginia Woolf
I hope you enjoyed these Virginia Woolf Quotes On Success. Do let us know which one was your favorite in the comments section below.
Check Out Novak Djokovic’s Top 10 Rules Of Success From Evan Carmichael:
Have A Great Day!
