“A whole lifetime was too short to bring out the full flavour, to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.”

— Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925)

About Virginia Woolf

1882 – 1941

English author and essayist considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. Known for stream-of-consciousness writing and pioneering essays on women and literature.

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“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

— Virginia Woolf

Attribution note: Source disputed or unverified.

“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.”

— Virginia Woolf

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

— Virginia Woolf

“They who know the truth are not equal to those who love it, and they who love it are not equal to those who delight in it.”

— Confucius

“Knowledge, that tendeth but to satisfaction, is but as a courtesan, which is for pleasure, and not for fruit or generation.”

— Francis Bacon

“If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”

— Francis Bacon

“That which is most excellent, and is most to be desired by all happy, honest and healthy-minded men, is dignified leisure.”

— Cicero

“The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness.”

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Knowledge is not happiness, and science but an exchange of ignorance for that which is another kind of ignorance.”

— Lord Byron

“A whole lifetime was too short to bring out the full flavour, to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning.”

About Virginia Woolf

More from Virginia Woolf

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