Virginia Woolf Quotes

Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.

Life is an incurable disease.

It was despairing to find out that I am mortal.

We try, we fail, we posture, we aspire, we pontificate - and then we age, shrink, die, and vanish.

What, if as said, man is a bubble.

Despite all the achievements of civilisation, the human being is still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth.

Little fly, thy summer's play My thoughtless hand has brushed away. Am not I a fly like thee? Or art not thou a man like me? For I dance and drink and sing, Till some blind hand shall brush my wing!

We have this wild life experience that is full of fantastic minutiae and banal, huge events at the same time. Yet, all of it shrinks in the shadow of death. It's hard to argue with death as a game-changer.

It's easy to forget people are blood and bone. They're not indestructible.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair.

We are fastened to a dying animal.

I used to believe I was going to live forever. And then you suddenly become aware that you're not.

I always know I can die at any moment.

Mortality defines the human condition.

A man does not die of love or his liver or even of old age; he dies of being a man.

Living is a sickness to which sleep provides relief every sixteen hours. It's a palliative. The remedy is death.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

We civilizations now know ourselves mortal.

It even feels absurd to be writing or singing a song at all - in the context of actual death, being alive feels absurd.

We pop into existence and we know that we die and we know that we lose everyone that we love and we know we even lose our own bodies. And what a paradigm. What a mystery.

The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it.

Who dares to be intellectual in the presence of death?

Wanderers eastward, wanderers west, Know you why you cannot rest? 'Tis that every mother's son Travails with a skeleton. Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night.

All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.