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"What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly."
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"Miracles focused gospel teaches us to be selfish and egocentric."
"Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!"
"If [literature] should turn into pure propaganda or pure entertainment, society will slip back into the sty of the immediate -- which is to say, the memoryless existence of hymenoptera and gastropods. None of this is so important, to be sure. The world can get by nicely without literature. But without human beings it can get by better yet."
"Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history."
"If the self-help books worked, it would be a shrinking industry not a growing one."
"Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity."
"God of blind believers is most likely to be cock-eyed."
Explore more quotes by Virginia Woolf
"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."
"Let a man get up and say, Behold, this is the truth, and instantly I perceive a sandy cat filching a piece of fish in the background. Look, you have forgotten the cat, I say."
"This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room."
"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."
"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
"Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible."
"The connection between dress and war is not far to seek; your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers."
"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?"
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