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Theirs, too, is the word-coining genius, as if thought plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

— Virginia Woolf The Common Reader (1925)

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Intelligence

More quotes by Virginia Woolf

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

A Room of One's Own (1929)

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

A Room of One's Own (1929)

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

The Moment and Other Essays (1948)

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

A Room of One's Own (1929)

As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

Orlando: A Biography (1928)

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Each of these private teachers who work for pay ... inculcates nothing else than these opinions of the multitude which they opine when they are assembled and calls this knowledge wisdom.

Socrates

Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

Wilhelm Reich Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering (2005)

Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

Anne Louise Germaine de Staël De l’Allemagne [Germany (1813)

Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Virginia Woolf (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.