Virginia Woolf on Knowledge
Browse 6 quotations attributed to Virginia Woolf, catalogued under knowledge, with dates where available.
This page displays 6 quotations attributed to Virginia Woolf and filed under "knowledge" in QuoteLineage. The selection is ordered by stored importance and quality scores, not citation counts. A topic label describes how an entry is catalogued; it does not establish the theme's importance in the author's work.
Attributed to Virginia Woolf, entry #57491: "Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust."
Attributed to Virginia Woolf, entry #50683: "She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst were between men and wo…"
6 Quotes by Virginia Woolf on Knowledge
"Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust."
"She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere."
"I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill."
"Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked by saying them?"
"But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England."
"Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay's knee."