Top 377 Quotes & Sayings by Charlotte Bronte - Page 2

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!

It is a pity that doing one's best does not always answer.

Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.

That to begin with; let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure.

Intelligence and proper education will give you independence of spirit.

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

Men, in general, are a sort of scum, very different to anything of which you have an idea.

Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere.

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

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

I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman.

What delusion has come over me? What sweet madness has seized me?

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.

A depressing and difficult passage has prefaced every page I have turned in life.

I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.

I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!

Is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?

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.

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

I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.

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

All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.

I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance what I have always said in theory - Wait God's will.

Neither birth nor sex forms a limit to genius.

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

You are human and fallible.

Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes.

Take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth.

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.

To see and know the worst is to take from Fear her main advantage.

I have for the first time found what I can truly love–I have found you. You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.

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

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.

His mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss.

The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and rather still wished it had held aloof.

Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words.

Enjoy the blessings Heaven bestows, Assist his friends, forgive his foes; Trust God, and keep his statutes still, Upright and firm, through good and ill; Thankful for all that God has given, Fixing his firmest hopes on heaven; Knowing that earthly joys decay, But hoping through the darkest day.

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.

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.

While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I enjoyed!

If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep inflicted lacerations never heal - cutting injuries and insults of serrated and poison-dripping edge - so, too, there are consolations of tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their echo: caressing kindnesses - loved, lingered over through a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself.

I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little.

That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life; that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar.

There's no use in weeping, Though we are condemned to part: There's such a thing as keeping, A remembrance in one's heart.

I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.

But solitude is sadness.' 'Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy lies heart-break.

He made me love him without looking at me.

I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitments, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it's expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it's perils.

Life is still life, whatever its pangs; our eyes and ears and their use remain with us, though the prospect of what pleases be wholly withdrawn, and the sound of what consoles must be silenced.

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness -- to glory?

Presentiments are strange things: and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity has not yet found the key.

It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.

To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

You transfix me quite.

The cool peace and dewy sweetness of the night filled me with a mood of hope: not hope on any definite point, but a general sense of encouragement and heart-ease.

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.

Talented people almost always know full well the excellence that is in them.

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

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.