Leonard Woolf Quotes

Anyone can be a barbarian; it requires a terrible effort to remain a civilized man.

— Leonard Woolf

“One must be crucified on one's own private cross.”

— Leonard Woolf

“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.”

— Leonard Woolf

“Nothing matters.”

— Leonard Woolf

“The mere fact that a very large number of people believe such a thing and that the world would be a better place if it were true, is no reason for believing that it is true.”

— Leonard Woolf

“There is nothing to be said except about the sheer waste and futility of it all. It is the war all over again, when one is rung up to be told that Rupert was dead, or that one's brother was killed, and one knew that it was only to produce the kind of world we are living in now. Horrible.”

— Leonard Woolf

You can't love by desiring
an extremely vague desire
of a very vague moon.

— Leonard Woolf

“It is never right for any individual or government to do any vast evil as a means to some hypothetical good.”

— Leonard Woolf

“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.”

— Leonard Woolf

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.

— Leonard Woolf

“I see clearly that I have achieved practically nothing.”

— Leonard Woolf

Nothing matters, and everything matters.

— Leonard Woolf

“The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentist's drill.”

— Leonard Woolf

At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer.

— Leonard Woolf

“There is nothing to which men cling more tenaciously than the privileges of class.”

— Leonard Woolf

“Leonard Woolf in a letter to Lytton Strachey said he hated John Maynard Keynes "for his crass stupidity and hideous face".”

— Leonard Woolf