# Quote — Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

> Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one self. By feeling that one has some innate superiority — it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney — for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination — over other people.

- Author: [Virginia Woolf](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf.md)
- Book: [A Room of One's Own](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own.md)
- Page: 35
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf#A_Room_of_One's_Own_(1929)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own/life-for-both

## More from this book

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

p. 17 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own/the-beauty-of-the.md)

> For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.

p. 51 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own/for-it-needs.md)

> Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

p. 35 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/a-room-of-ones-own/women-have-served.md)