Skip to content

Psychology Quotes by Virginia Woolf

102 Psychology quotes by Virginia Woolf

All Psychology quotes Virginia Woolf’s page

Virginia Woolf describes a mind that wanders like a lost child, searching for meaning in quiet spaces. She writes that letting thoughts flow without speaking can bring relief and open hidden doors. She also notes that the mind can feel both past and present, like a light flickering through beech leaves.

Rate this collection: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

“What I value is the naked contact of a mind.”

Image

“Nothing exists outside of us except a state of mind...”

Image

“Shakespeare's state of mind”

Image

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

Image

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

Image

“I do not believe that gifts, whether of mind or character, can be weighed like sugar and butter”

Image

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

Image

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

Image

“How was one to lasso her mind, and tether it to this minute, unimportant spot?”

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

“For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are…

Image

“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To…

Image

I find that when I've seen a certain number of people my mind becomes like an old match box -- the part…

Image

But why do I notice everything? She thought. Why must I think? She did not want to think. She wanted to force…

Image

Neither of us knows what the public will think. There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to…

Image

“But none speaks with a single voice. None with a voice free from the old vibrations. Always I hear corrupt murmurs; the…

Image

“I need someone whose mind falls like a chopper on a block; to whom the pitch of absurdity is sublime, and a…

Image

“Purposely, perhaps, Mary did not agree with Ralph; she loved to feel her mind in conflict with his, and to be certain…

Image

“We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying what we think, then how little…

Image

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking…

Image

“she heard some voice saying she couldn't paint, saying she couldn't create, as if she were caught up in one of those…

Image

“Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the…

Image

I must try to set aside half an hour in some part of my day, and consecrate it to diary writing. Give…

Image

In certain favorable moods, memories -- what one has forgotten -- come to the top. Now if this is so, is it…

Image

“The mind of man works with strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of…

Image

“I took the print of life not outwardly, but inwardly upon the raw, the white, the unprotected fibre. I am clouded and…

Image

A very elementary exercise in psychology, not to be dignified by the name of psycho-analysis, showed me, on looking at my notebook,…

Image

“For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are…

Image

In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female: and in the man's brain, the man predominates over the woman,…

Image

“The morning was hot, and the exercise of reading left her mind contracting and expanding like the main-spring of a clock, and…

Image

“being an artist: "And this susceptibility of theirs is doubly unfortunate , I thought, returning again to my original enquiry into what…

Image

“...she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like…

Image

“... All who have brought about a state of sex-consciousness are to blame, and it is they who drive me, when I…

Image

“Somehow the fact that only three or four hundred years ago these skeletons had been men with their way to make in…

Image

“The sweetness of this content overflowing runs down the walls of my mind, and liberates understanding.”

Image

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

Image

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

Image

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

Image

Other authors on Psychology

More by Virginia Woolf

Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.

“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre, and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exaltation. I am about…

“Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword. On one side all is correct, definite, orderly; the paths…

“Other worshipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God, all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the shape of…

Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.

“Sometimes he woke with a brain like lead; at others it was as if a thousand wax tapers were alight and people were throwing…

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman's life -…

A veil of insanity everywhere: Oh why I was born in this age? It is a terrible age.

Love ought to stop on both sides, don’t you think, simultaneously?’ He spoke without any stress on the words, so as not to wake…

“It is so vast an alleviation to be able to point for another to look at. And then not to talk. To follow the…

“What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! (...) I think I could happily live here & read forever.”

“what a luxury to be alone once more,”

“...a woman writing thinks back through her mothers.”

“For one's children so often gave one's own perceptions a little thrust forwards.”

“She would not say of anyone in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same…