Virginia Woolf Quotes

For intellectuals, everyone's mind is closed but their own.

The heart and the mind, what an enigma.

I have lived a long time, and one thing I have come to see is that one is well served by a degree of both humility and charity when judging the inner workings of another person's heart

A scholar's heart is a dark well in which are buried many aborted feelings that rise to the surface as arguments.

The heart has its reasons; it's the mind that's suspect.

A society struggles to fulfill its best instincts, even as an individual does, and generally makes just as hard going of it. The fight against prejudice is an inevitable process. Man has been warring against his own lower nature ever since he found out he had one, and the battle against intolerance is part of the same old struggle between good and evil that has preoccupied us ever since we gave up swinging from trees.

When men hate or blame you, or say hurtful things about you, look deeply into their hearts and see what kind of men they are. You'll see how unnecessary it is to strain after their good opinion. Yet you must still think kindly of them. they are your neighbors. The gods help them as they do you, by dreams and oracles, to win their hearts' desires.

How could I know a famished heart will eat its mind? Can kill its body?

It's not the gods But our own hearts We need to fear. The evil starts Against all odds Not there but here.

Everything he'd done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they'd had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

I had lost my mind and fallen into my heart.

I have a congenital desire to contradict; my whole life is merely a chain of sad and unsuccessful contradictions to heart and mind. When faced with enthusiasm, I am seized by a midwinter freeze, and I suppose that frequent dealings with sluggish phlegmatics would have made a passionate dreamer.

Imagination does not enable us to invent as many different contradictions as there are by nature in every heart.

In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.

The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself

In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice... No one can live in the light all the time.

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.

That strange, twisted, torn love. That conflict between what your heart knows is right and what your mind is told is right.

Psychologically, I will not have to seek far if I decide to kill myself, because in my mind and heart I am more ready for this than for the unplanned daily tribulations that mark off the mornings and afternoons.

The mind can't take you where your heart longs to go.

The seed of every sin is in every heart.

Virtue!--to be good and just-- Every heart, when sifted well, Is a clot of warmer dust, Mix'd with cunning sparks of hell.

I can be very in my head, but I don't trust my head all that much. My head is crazy. My head will talk to itself all day and all night if I let it. And my heart is less nutty, but it's kind of like an overexcited child. I don't trust my heart all that much either. My body is like a good horse. I trust my body.

The human mind is generally far more eager to praise or dispraise than it is to describe and define.