Leonard Woolf Famous Quotes
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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.
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.
At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.
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.
I see clearly that I have achieved practically nothing.
Nothing matters.
It is never right for any individual or government to do any vast evil as a means to some hypothetical good.
Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.
Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".
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.
One must be crucified on one's own private cross.
Nothing matters, and everything matters.
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.
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.
