Charlotte Bronte Quotes

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.

The idea of seeing the sea - of being near it - watching its changes by sunrise, sunset, moonlight, and noonday - in calm, perhaps in storm - fills and satisfies my mind.

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.

Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.

I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.

A great deal; you are good to those who are good to you. It is all I ever desire to be. If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way; they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should - so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.

Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.

I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman.

There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.

Whatever my powers--feminine or the contrary--God had given them, and I felt resolute to be ashamed of no faculty of his bestowal.

I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

Oh madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children's mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!

My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot of contamination must be an exquisite treasure-an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?

There is, I am convinced, no picture that conveys in all its dreadfulness, a vision of sorrow, despairing, remediless, supreme. If I could paint such a picture, the canvas would show only a woman looking down at her empty arms.

Good-night, my-" He stopped, bit his lip, and abruptly left me.

Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!

I knew you would do me good in some way, at some time--I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.

God did not give me my life to throw it away.

Better to be without logic than without feeling.

I knew, you would do me good, in some way, at some time;- I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not- (again he stopped)- did not (he proceeded hastily) strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing.

What you want to ignite in others must first burn inside yourself.

Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.

To the dear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break... I am ever tender and true.

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.

You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.

'My bride is here,' Rochester said , again drawing me to him, 'because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?'

Feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.

Remorse is the poison of life.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Friendship however is a plant which cannot be forced -- true friendship is no gourd spring up in a night and withering in a day.

The shadows are as important as the light.

Conventionality is not morality.

But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!

I hold another creed, which no one ever taught me, and which I seldom mention, but in which I delight, and to which I cling, for it extends hope to all; it makes eternity a rest - a mighty home, not a terror and an abyss. Besides, with this creed, I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last; with this creed, revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low. I live in calm, looking to the end.

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.

I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.

Out of association grows adhesion, and out of adhesion amalgamation.

Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.

We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.

Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation." "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.

Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.

I have little left in myself -- I must have you. The world may laugh -- may call me absurd, selfish -- but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.

Oh! that gentleness! how far more potent is it than force!