Virginia Woolf Quotes

In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of effective communication between people.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

Yet human experience and the practice of communication have shown throughout the ages that definitions are an illusion, like having a speech defect and trying to say love but unable to get the word out, or, better, having a tongue in one's head but unable to feel love.

The instinctive and universal taste of mankind selects flowers for the expression of its finest sympathies, their beauty and their fleetingness serving to make them the most fitting symbols of those delicate sentiments for which language itself seems almost too gross a medium.

Liz, I like you very much," he says. "Oh," she says, "I like you very much, too!" Owen is not sure if she means "O" for Owen, or just plan "Oh." He is not sure what difference it would make in either case. He feels the needs to clarify. "When I said 'I like you very much,' I actually meant 'I love you.'" "O," she says, "I actually meant the same thing." She closes the car door behind her. "Well," he says to himself, driving back to his apartment, "isn't that something?

The words we read and words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.

I used to listen to it all the time when I was little and thinking about grown-up things. I would go to my bedroom window and stare at my reflection in the glass and the trees behind it and just listen to the song for hours. I decided then that when I met someone I thought was as beautiful as the song, I should give it to that person. And I didn’t mean beautiful on the outside. I meant beautiful in all ways.

To understand is nothing, but to be understood-that is the problem and the source of anguish. The soul throbs and would have the other know-but can not and feels isolated. Then come gestures, words, awkward explanations and material symbols for imponderable outbursts of feeling-and the soul despairs.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.

I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)

Just be yourself, it means to be beautiful.

I do feel like it's so important not to take that for granted - that opportunity to share your ideas with intelligent, beautiful people.

Words seem so futile, so feeble. You are all such lovely, beautiful people ... thank you.

Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse. The sight of monkeys or apes induces an irresistible urge in people to jump up and down, exaggeratedly scratch themselves and holler in a way that must make the primates wonder how this otherwise so intelligent species has come to depend on such inferior means of communication.

That's what's wrong with women. They want you to wait for them until they get ready and then they don't even tell you how they feel.

Elegance means being beautiful both on the inside and out.

Although we do come from a silent profession, it is important for us to verbalize what we want to say. (As I tell my students): you could love someone all your life, but if you never say it how are they going to know? There comes a point when you have to say what you mean, which makes you scream louder when you dance.

In his head, his mother said, 'People shout when they don’t have the vocabulary to whisper'.

The curves of your lips rewrite history.

Language is the most beautiful and destructive thing because it allows you to express yourself, but it totally confuses everything.

What does music mean to you? What would you do without music?

Style. People talk about it being stylish and beautiful, that's at the service of the story. Style for me means nothing without substance and there are moments and things about the film that are stylish but hopefully at the service of the story.

The most beautiful thing about music is that it transcends most anything.

Sometimes words are not enough.

For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.