Best 17 quotes of Leonard Woolf on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

The grinding of the intellect is for most people as painful as a dentists drill.

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

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

I believe profoundly in two rules. Justice and mercy – they seem to me the foundation of all civilized life and society, if you include under mercy, toleration.

I see clearly that I have achieved practically nothing.

It is just as easy to use a good principle for bad ends as it is to use a bad principle for good ends.

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

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.

Novels by serious writers of genius often eventually become best-sellers, but most contemporary best-sellers are written by second-class writers whose psychological brew contains a touch of naïvety, a touch of sentimentality, the story-telling gift, and a mysterious sympathy with the day-dreams of ordinary people.

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.

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.

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.

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.