# Quote — Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Volume 1

> For ourselves, who are ordinary men and women, let us return thanks to Nature for her bounty by using every one of the senses she has given us; vary our state as much as possible; turn now this side, now that, to the warmth, and relish to the full before the sun goes down the kisses of youth and the echoes of a beautiful voice singing Catullus. Every season is likeable, and wet days and fine, red wine and white, company and solitude. Even sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life, can be full of dreams; and the most common actions—a walk, a talk, solitude in one's own orchard—can be enhanced and lit up by the association of the mind. Beauty is everywhere, and beauty is only two finger's-breadth from goodness.

- Author: [Virginia Woolf](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf.md)
- Book: [The Common Reader: Volume 1](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/the-common-reader-volume-1.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf#The_Common_Reader_(1925)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/the-common-reader-volume-1/for-ourselves-who

## More from this book

> Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/the-common-reader-volume-1/let-us-record.md)

> But delightful though it is to indulge in righteous indignation, it is misplaced if we agree with the lady's-maid that high birth is a form of congenital insanity, that the sufferer merely inherits the diseases of his ancestors, and endures them, for the most part very stoically, in one of those comfortably padded lunatic asylums which are known, euphemistically, as the stately homes of England.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/the-common-reader-volume-1/but-delightful-though.md)

> But can we go to posterity with a sheaf of loose pages, or ask the readers of those days, with the whole of literature before them, to sift our enormous rubbish heaps for our tiny pearls? Such are the questions which the critics might lawfully put to their companions at table, the novelists and poets.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/virginia-woolf/the-common-reader-volume-1/but-can-we.md)