Leonard Woolf > Quotes

“Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.”
― Leonard Woolf

“Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.”
― Leonard Woolf

“Nothing matters. You get yourself into a state in which you imagine things which have no basis in reality... One begins for some reason to worry about something and, if one allows oneself to go on doing that, one gradually imagines all kinds of things. It is a kind of self-indulgence and one gets into a perpetual daydream. It is essential to stop this process and face the real world -- which is never so bad as all that.”
― Leonard Woolf

“They say: 'Come to tea and let us comfort you.' But it's no good. One must be crucified on one's own private cross. I know that V. will not come across the garden from the lodge, & yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned & yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page & yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one's stupidity & selfishness.”
― Leonard Woolf

“Suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting room window: “Hitler is making a speech.” I shouted back, “I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.”
― Leonard Woolf, Downhill All The Way: An Autobiography Of The Years 1919 To 1939

“You can't love by desiring
an extremely vague desire
of a very vague moon.”
― Leonard Woolf

“I get your moments when nothing seems to matter & I suppose that most of the time we, or I at any rate, are passively inert to happiness or unhappiness. I mean that we are so persistently automatic that most of the day is a trance. When I do think or feel, it is usually with rage or despair. Don’t you feel often or always that there is so little time to lose, & that we are losing it so fast. The Christians are right there, I feel, it wouldn’t matter if there were another life, if there were some chance of making up for the time we are cruelly forced to lose here. But to be hurrying to annihilation, & only to have lived for a hour or two out of twenty five years! And you say, as they all would say, ‘I feel it’s an episode’: you don’t seem to see that in a few minutes we shall be old & in a few hours dead, that it’s an episode between youth & life, & sterility & annihilation.”
― Leonard Woolf, Letters of Leonard Woolf

“They said, 'Come to tea and let us comfort you.' But it is no good. One must be crucified on one's own private cross. It is a strange fact that a terrible pain in the heart can be interrupted by a little pain in the fourth toe of the right foot. I know that V. will not come across the garden from the lodge, & yet I look in that direction for her. I know that she is drowned & yet I listen for her to come in at the door. I know that it is the last page & yet I turn it over. There is no limit to one's stupidity and selfishness.”
― Leonard Woolf

“Nothing matters.”
― Leonard Woolf

“The violent but narrow passions that pass under the name of patriotism are not the noblest forms of human and social emotions. The world, or the people who, unfortunately, have most to say in governing the world, believe no such thing, and will not believe it when the representatives of States meet again to decide how to fill up the graves which they helped dig in Europe.”
― Leonard Woolf, International Government

“It is never right for any individual or government to do any vast evil as a means to some hypothetical good.”
― Leonard Woolf

“One must be crucified on one’s own private cross.”
― Leonard Woolf

“It’s a sort of dull unhappiness that comes from isolation & blankness & monotony. It is quite different to the dullness & melancholia at home; I believe people have it sometimes in Kipling & it is, I think, in the air of the country. I went for a walk the other night by the side of the lagoon at sunset; the beauty of it was supreme with the bright green of the paddy fields, the masses of palms, the sky every shade of red & yellow, & the sea every shade of blue; but for all the brilliancy of colour there was a heavy melancholy over it all.”
― Leonard Woolf, Letters of Leonard Woolf

“Life consisted of a few isolated flashes of existence, oases in a great wilderness of boredom. We live once perhaps in a week, sometimes perhaps in a year. I incline for the moment to the belief—it is in the Symposium almost—that Life is only a striving, to make two souls into one, to complete the bisected mystic circle. Each soul is but a half circle, there is somewhere its complement & we are all striving, searching to find the other half. Sometimes we find one that is almost—but not quite—the complement, the soul of a man or woman alive or the soul of a dead man living in music or poem—& there is a flash of soul fire & for a moment we live. But the flame dies down for the circle was not complete & then the old wandering in the wilderness of Boredom begins again. If only one could really complete the circle! Poets, artists & musicians are the happiest—for they create another soul out of their own & these two half circles—the old & the self-created souls—join & there is a flash that never dies down & they always live.”
― Leonard Woolf, Letters of Leonard Woolf

“I believe profoundly in two rules. Justice and mercy – they seem to me the foundation of all civilized life and society, if you include under mercy, toleration.”
― Leonard Woolf

“Life is not an orderly progression, self-contained like a musical scale or a quadratic equation... If one is to record one's life truthfully, one must aim at getting into the record of it something of the disorderly discontinuity which makes it so absurd, unpredictable, bearable.”
― Leonard Woolf

“Nothing matters, and everything matters.”
― Leonard Woolf

“I see clearly that I have achieved practically nothing.”
― Leonard Woolf

“There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.”
― Leonard Woolf

“It is just as easy to use a good principle for bad ends as it is to use a bad principle for good ends.”
― Leonard Woolf, International Government

“You can't love by desiring an extremely vague desire of a very vague moon.”
― Leonard Woolf

“The mere fact that a very large number of people believe such a thing and that the world would be a better place if it were true, is no reason for believing that it is true.”
― Leonard Woolf

“The idea is more horny on paper than in practice.”
― Leonard Woolf, International Government

“The fact is, I find it extremely difficult to force myself to read old letters... Whenever one really knows the facts, one finds that what is accepted by contemporaries or posterity as the truth about them is so distorted or out of focus that it is not worth worrying about.”
― Leonard Woolf