Virginia Woolf Quotes

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

I aspire only to silence.

The heart beats louder and the soul hears quicker in silence and solitude.

The teaching arises out of the stillness. But when I'm alone, there's only the stillness, and that is my favorite place.

Cultivating quietness is a missing discipline today...the quietness needed to nurture an inner life hid in Christ.

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening.

The sum of evil, Pascal remarked, would be much diminished if men could only learn to sit quietly in their rooms.

Sometimes I long for a convent cell, with the sublime wisdom of centuries set out on bookshelves all along the wall and a view across the cornfields--there must be cornfields and they must wave in the breeze--and there I would immerse myself in the wisdom of the ages and in myself. Then I might perhaps find peace and clarity. But that would be no great feat. It is right here, in this very place, in the here and the now, that I must find them.

Some of us need to discover that we will not begin to live more fully until we have the courage to do and see and taste and experience much less than usual... And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all. The very act of resting is the hardest and most courageous act he can perform.

It is important from time to time to slow down, to go away by yourself, and simply be.

There is nothing like being left alone again, to walk peacefully with oneself in the woods. To boil one's coffee and fill one's pipe, and to think idly and slowly as one does it.

At heart I am a librarian, a bird-watcher, a transcendentalist, a gardener, a spinster, a monk.

When was the last time you spent a quiet moment just doing nothing - just sitting and looking at the sea, or watching the wind blowing the tree limbs, or waves rippling on a pond, a flickering candle or children playing in the park?

I feel calm when I'm on my own.

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

I don't have a circus around me, and that's a choice. I like to be on Planet Earth as much as possible.

One ought to sink to the bottom of the sea, probably, and live alone with one's words.

To step away from the world isn't to draw back; it's actually a way to tune in.

The secret to living in the rush of the world with a minimum of pain is to get as many people as possible to string along with your delusions; the trick to living alone up here, away from all agitating entanglements, allurements, and expectations, apart especially from one's own intensity, is to organize the silence, to think of its mountaintop plenitude as capital, silence as wealth exponentially increasing. The encircling silence as your chosen source of advantage and your only intimate.

Stillness empowers. Being able to detach from all external stimulants - social media, social engagements, TV, alcohol, food, etc. - and face our own silence is an enormous luxury that should not be taken for granted. The most rewarding moments in my life have stemmed from such stillness.

My life is routine. I wake up early in the morning. I brush my teeth. I sit on the floor of the cell I do not go to breakfast. I stare at a gray cement wall. I keep my legs crossed my back straight my eyes forward. I take deep breaths in and out, in and out, and I try not to move. I sit for as long as I can I sit until everything hurts I sit until everything stops hurting I sit until I lose myself in the gray wall I sit until my mind becomes as blank as the gray wall. I sit and I stare and I breathe. I sit and I stare. I breathe.

Take time to be quiet.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

There is no need to go to India or anywhere else to find peace. You will find that deep place of silence right in your room, your garden or even your bathtub.

It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself.