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

Woolf’s line links self-knowledge to ethical and artistic truth-telling. It suggests that any attempt to describe, judge, or represent others is distorted if the speaker is evasive about their own motives, fears, desires, and biases. In Woolf’s broader modernist outlook—where consciousness, subjectivity, and the limits of narration are central—the quote can be read as a warning against false objectivity: the “truth” about other people is inseparable from the observer’s inner life. It also implies a moral discipline: honesty with oneself is a prerequisite for fairness, empathy, and accurate perception of others.