Virginia Woolf Quotes About Soul

Quotes about: Soul

• Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.

  Virginia Woolf

  Numbness, People, Soul

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2280, Delphi Classics

• Books are the mirrors of the soul.

  Virginia Woolf

  Book, Reading, Mirrors

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1835, Delphi Classics

• 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

  Writing, Soul, Secret

  Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.122, Oxford University Press, USA

• 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

  Caring, Thinking, Essence

  Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (1986). “The Essays of Virginia Woolf: 1925-1928”, Chatto & Windus

• Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth.

  Virginia Woolf

  Soul, Atmosphere, Earth

  Virginia Woolf, Michael H. Whitworth (2014). “Orlando: A Biography”, p.119, Oxford University Press, USA

• For this is the truth about our soul, he thought, who fish-like inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom, cold, deep, inscrutable; suddenly she shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself, gossiping.

  Virginia Woolf

  Sports, Weed, Wind

  Virginia Woolf (1996). “Mrs Dalloway”, p.117, Wordsworth Editions

• 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

  Beautiful, Dark, Self

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories”, p.28, Courier Corporation

• She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

  Virginia Woolf

  Light, Soul, Waterfalls

• 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

  Courage, Mean, Thinking

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “The Common Reader”, p.59, Lulu Press, Inc

• Above all you must illumine your own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what your beauty means to you or your plainness, and what is your relation to the ever-changing and turning world.

  Virginia Woolf

  Mean, Carpe Diem, Vanity

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.618, Wordsworth Editions

• Sir, I would trust you with my heart. Moreover, we have left our bodies in the banqueting hall. Those on the turf are the shadows of our souls.

  Virginia Woolf

  Heart, Soul, Shadow

  Virginia Woolf (2014). “Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

• Yes, yes, I'm coming. Right up the top of the house. One moment I'll linger. How the mud goes round in the mind-what a swirl these monsters leave, the waters rocking, the weeds waving and green here, black there, striking to the sand, till by degrees the atoms reassemble, the deposit sifts itself, and a gain through the eyes one sees clear and still, and there comes to the lips some prayer for the departed, some obsequy for the souls of those one nods to, the one never meets again.

  Virginia Woolf

  Weed, Prayer, Eye

  Virginia Woolf (2014). “Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

• Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.

  Virginia Woolf

  Play, Support, Soul

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.2281, Delphi Classics

• But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter!

  Virginia Woolf

  Beautiful, Eye, Winter

  Virginia Woolf (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.303, OUP Oxford

• 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

  Time, Believe, Optimistic

  Virginia Woolf (2003). “A Writer's Diary”, p.193, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hands, Feet, Bird

  Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw (2009). “Selected Essays”, p.104, Oxford University Press

• It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul; never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment the brute would be stirring, this hatred.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hatred, Soul, Monsters

  Virginia Woolf (2012). “Mrs. Dalloway - Broadview Edition”, p.12, Broadview Press

• I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

  Virginia Woolf

  People, Soul, Unhappy

  Virginia Woolf, Joanne Trautmann Banks (1977). “A change of perspective”, Vintage

• To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.

  Virginia Woolf

  Song, Silly, Fall

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1221, Delphi Classics

• every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people's hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.

  Virginia Woolf

  Hands, People, Soul

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.499, Wordsworth Editions

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