All VIRGINIA WOOLF Quotes about “Authority”

“To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.”
“A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.”
“But it is just when opinions universally prevail and we have added lip service to their authority that we become sometimes most keenly conscious that we do not believe a word that we are saying.”

More Virginia Woolf quote about:

You may also like:

Charles Dickens
Writer
Emily Bronte
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway
Author
Florence Nightingale
Statistician
James Joyce
Novelist
Jane Austen
Novelist
Leonard Woolf
Author
Simone de Beauvoir
Writer
Sylvia Plath
Poet
T. S. Eliot
Playwright
Vita Sackville-West
Author
William Faulkner
Writer