Philosophy Quote by Virginia Woolf — Inspiring Words on Life, Love & Wisdom

“I often wish I'd got on better with your father,' he said.”

“It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking, which did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.”

“Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?”

“And that is the time to read poetry . . . when we are almost able to write it.”

“The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.”

“The best reaction to a paradox is to invent a genuinely new and deep idea.”

“It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.”

“I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy.”

“Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowling over his father, watched him lean back into absolute shadow.”

“Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance and shimmy, and you've got an audience!”

“Forgiveness is created by the restitution of the abuser; of the wrongdoer. It is not something to be squeeeeeezed out of the victim in a further act of conscience-corrupting abuse.”