Virginia Woolf Mind Quotations

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

For what Harley Street specialist has time to understand the body, let alone the mind or both in combination, when he is a slave to thirteen thousand a year?

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

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.

It is the nature of the artist to mind excessively what is said about him. Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.

They went in and out of each other's minds without any effort.

There is no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.

It was the intimacy, a sort of spiritual suppleness, when mind prints upon mind indelibly.

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.

I [who] am perpetually making notes in the margin of my mind for some final statement...

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

The intellect, divine as it is, and all worshipful, has a habit of lodging in the most seedy of carcasses, and often, alas, acts the cannibal among the other faculties so that often, where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.

The mind must be allowed to settle undisturbed over the object in order to secrete the pearl.

Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.

My mind works in idleness. To do nothing is often my most profitable way.

Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure

They lack suggestive power. And when a book lacks suggestive power, however hard it hits the surface of the mind it cannot penetrate within.

The mind is the most capricious of insects — flitting, fluttering.

I like the unreality of your mind; the whole thing is very splendid and voluptuous and absurd.

The mind which is most capable of receiving impressions is very often the least capable of drawing conclusions.

No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes

But how entirely I live in my imagination; how completely depend upon spurts of thought, coming as I walk, as I sit; things churning up in my mind and so making a perpetual pageant, which is to be my happiness.

Romantic Love is only an Illusion. A story one makes up in One's Mind about Another Person.

She felt drawing further from her and further from her an Archduke, (she did not mind that) a fortune, (she did not mind that) the safety and circumstance of married life, (she did not mind that) but life she heard going from her, and a lover.

It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road.

I attain a different kind of beauty, achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the mind's passage through the world, achieve in the end some kind of whole made of shivering fragments.

In certain favorable moods, memories -- what one has forgotten -- come to the top. Now if this is so, is it not possible -- I often wonder -- that things we have felt with great intensity have an existence independent of our minds; are in fact still in existence? And if so, will it not be possible, in time, that some device will be invented by which we can tap them?

Anecdote: A house that is rooted to one spot but can travel as quickly as you change your mind and is complete in itself is surely the most desirable of houses. Our modern house with its cumbersome walls and its foundations planted deep in the ground is nothing better than a prison and more and more prison like does it become the longer we live there, and wear fetters of a association and sentiment.