Leonard Woolf

“Barbarism and civilization are not conditions of society; they are states of the soul.”

“The great menace to the world today is not the atom bomb... but the dogmatic mind.”

“It is a strange feeling, writing the last words of a book. You are glad to be finished, but sorry too.”

“The world has always been a silly and a stupid place.”

“A writer's life is in his work, and that is the place to find it.”

“Happiness is a garden, but it is a garden which is always in ruins.”

“The only tolerable substitute for salt is genius.”

“The paraphernalia of power is gigantic, disruptive, and spiritually wasteful.”

“I see that I have lived in a world of illusion, and that the reality is quite different from what I imagined.”

“It is in the garden that one returns to the state of innocence.”

“The older I get the more I am convinced that the most important thing in life is to be amused.”

“We are all of us desperately lonely, and we are all of us desperately in need of love.”