Top 377 Quotes & Sayings by Charlotte Bronte

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

Conventionality is not morality.

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

Let your performance do the thinking.

Men judge us by the success of our efforts. God looks at the efforts themselves.

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.

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.

Look twice before you leap.

If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.

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

Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties.

If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.

Who has words at the right moment?

Memory in youth is active and easily impressible; in old age it is comparatively callous to new impressions, but still retains vividly those of earlier years.

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter - in the eye.

True enthusiasm is a fine feeling whose flash I admire where-ever I see it.

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.

Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.

Give him enough rope and he will hang himself.

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

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

I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.

I am always easy of belief when the creed pleases me.

I don't call you handsome, sir, though I love you most dearly: far too dearly to flatter you. Don't flatter me.

I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow firm there, firm as weeds among stones.

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

You know full well as I do the value of sisters' affections: There is nothing like it in this world.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Better to be without logic than without feeling.

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.

Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.

Spring drew on... and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that hope traversed them at night and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.

Die without me if you will. Live for me if you dare.

The shadows are as important as the light.

Youth has its romance, and maturity its wisdom, as morning and spring have their freshness, noon and summer their power, night and winter their repose. Each attribute is good in its own season.

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.

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

It is not violence that best overcomes hate -- nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.

Your will shall decide your destiny.

The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.

To talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.

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

I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.

Remorse is the poison of life.

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

If you don't love another living soul, then you'll never be disappointed.

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

I like rudeness a great deal better than flattery.

Better to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank.

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

Beauty is in the eye of the gazer.

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

Misery generates hate.

Rapidly, merrily, Life's sunny hours flit by, Gratefully, cheerily Enjoy them as they fly!

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

Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.

Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star.