230 Quotes by Charlotte Bronte
Charlotte Bronte was a brilliant and influential English novelist, born in 1816. Her literary masterpiece, "Jane Eyre," remains a timeless classic celebrated for its strong-willed heroine and exploration of social class, gender roles, and morality. Bronte's writing style expertly weaves together elements of Gothic romance, psychological depth, and moral introspection, captivating readers with a profound understanding of human nature. Through her works, Bronte challenged the prevailing norms of her time and fearlessly addressed issues of oppression and inequality, especially for women. Her writing delves into the complexities of the human psyche, illuminating the struggles of her characters with sensitivity and authenticity. By crafting narratives that resonated with readers' emotions and intellect, Charlotte Bronte's impact on the literary world endures to this day, inspiring generations of writers and readers alike.
Charlotte Bronte Quotes
I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward. (Meaning)
Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition. (Quote Meaning)
I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. (Meaning)
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. (Quote Meaning)
I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward. (Meaning)
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.
There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort. (Quote Meaning)
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!
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?
Good-night, my-" He stopped, bit his lip, and abruptly left me.
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.
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!
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
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 human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed. (Meaning)
Better to be without logic than without feeling.
What you want to ignite in others must first burn inside yourself.
God did not give me my life to throw it away.
Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.
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.
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. (Quote Meaning)
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.
Remorse is the poison of life.
The shadows are as important as the light.
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.
Conventionality is not morality.
But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!
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.
Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste. (Meaning)
I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will. (Quote Meaning)
Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. (Meaning)
I have not broken your heart - you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.
Oh! that gentleness! how far more potent is it than force!
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.
If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love our friend for their sakes rather than for our own. (Quote Meaning)
I don't call you handsome, sir, though I love you most dearly: far too dearly to flatter you. Don't flatter me.
If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and fine days will seem!
Fair as a lily, and not only the pride of life, but the desire of his eyes
Look twice before you leap.
There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.
Die without me if you will. Live for me if you dare.
Men judge us by the success of our efforts. God looks at the efforts themselves. (Meaning)
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.
I would always rather be happy than dignified. (Quote Meaning)
I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends.
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.
True enthusiasm is a fine feeling whose flash I admire where-ever I see it.
Men, in general, are a sort of scum, very different to anything of which you have an idea.
But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?
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.
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.
My hopes were all dead --- struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.
The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye. (Meaning)
But afterwards, is there nothing more for me in life - no true home - nothing to be dearer to me than myself?
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education. (Quote Meaning)
I am no bird and no net ensnares me.
Take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth.
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.
If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed.
Better to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank. (Meaning)
That to begin with; let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure.
Rapidly, merrily, Life's sunny hours flit by, Gratefully, cheerily Enjoy them as they fly!
It is a pity that doing one's best does not always answer.
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. (Quote Meaning)
Talented people almost always know full well the excellence that is in them.
I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
In sunshine, in prosperity, the flowers are very well; but how many wet days are there in life—November seasons of disaster, when a man's hearth and home would be cold indeed, without the clear, cheering gleam of intellect.
I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.
Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.
I believe that creature is a changeling: she is a perfect cabinet of oddities.
Beauty is in the eye of the gazer.
Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star.
I like rudeness a great deal better than flattery.
I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman.
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.
But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master--something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent.
You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not: I need not ask you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it.
Unlawful pleasure, trenching on another's rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasureits hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave forever.
Oft a little morning rain Foretells a pleasant day.
We should acknowledge God merciful, but not always for us comprehensible.
Your will shall decide your destiny.
Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.
The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.
It is not violence that best overcomes hate -- nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.
Give him enough rope and he will hang himself.
A depressing and difficult passage has prefaced every page I have turned in life.
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.
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.
He made me love him without looking at me.
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.
Well had Solomon said,'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.
Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.
I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.
You know full well as I do the value of sisters' affections: There is nothing like it in this world. (Meaning)
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.
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.
Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?
The vehemence of emotion, stirred by grief and love within me, was claiming mastery, and struggling for full sway; and asserting a right to predominate: to overcome, to live, rise, and reign at last; yes,--and to speak.
Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive.
Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive. The sternest-seeming stoic is human after all, and to burst with boldness and good-will into the silent sea of their souls is often to confer on them the first of obligations.
I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.
Reader, I married him.
Because when she failed, I saw how she might have succeeded. Arrows that continually glanced off from Mr. Rochester's breast and fell harmless at his feet, might, I knew, if shot by a surer hand, have quivered keen in his proud heart - have called love into his stern eye, and softness into his sardonic face, or better still, without weapons a silent conquest might have been won.
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.
I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.
Misery generates hate.
You are human and fallible.
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.
To talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.
If you don't love another living soul, then you'll never be disappointed.
You transfix me quite.
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.
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.
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Little Jane's love would have been my best reward, without it, my heart is broken.
I never met your likeness. Jane: you please me, and you master me - you seem to submit, and I like the sense of pliancy you impart; and while I am twining the soft, silken skein round my finger, it sends a thrill up my arm to my heart. I am influenced - conquered; and the influence is sweeter than I can express; and the conquest I undergo has a witchery beyond any triumph _I_ can win.
Her coming was my hope each day, Her parting was my pain; The chance that did her steps delay Was ice in every vein.
If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage - I mean marriage in the vulgar, weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment.
His mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss.
Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.
Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.
Shake me off, then, sir--push me away; for I'll not leave you of my own accord.
There is a perverse mood of the mind which is rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored. What honest man on being casually taken for a housebreaker does not feel rather tickled than vexed at the mistake?
A reader kindly pointed out to me recently that most of the quotes I include are by men. And it's true. Personally, I don't even consider whether the author is male or female, nor even care much who the author is - what's significant is the message. Of course, women are equally capable of great insights, however in our culture it's not so long ago that women could not even be published
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.
Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.
What the deuce is to do now?
Make my happiness--I will make yours.
Let your performance do the thinking.
Adversity is a good school.
Unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules.
Neither birth nor sex forms a limit to genius.
It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.
as much good-will may be conveyed in one hearty word as in many.
Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.
Tact, if it be genuine, never sleeps.
You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --
You — you strange — you almost unearthly thing! — I love as my own flesh. You — poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are — I entreat to accept me as a husband.
Intelligence and proper education will give you independence of spirit.
I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance what I have always said in theory - Wait God's will.
Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes.
To see and know the worst is to take from Fear her main advantage.
The man of regular life and rational mind never despairs.
While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I enjoyed!
What delusion has come over me? What sweet madness has seized me?
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.
Sometimes I have the strangest feeling about you. Especially when you are near me as you are now. It feels as though I had a string tied here under my left rib where my heart is, tightly knotted to you in a similar fashion. And when you go to Ireland, with all that distance between us, I am afraid that this cord will be snapped, and I shall bleed inwardly.
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.
Who has words at the right moment?
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.
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?
But solitude is sadness.' 'Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy lies heart-break.
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?
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.
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.
Amid the worry of a self- condemnatory soliloquy, his demeanour seemed grave, perhaps cold, both to me and his mother. And yet there was no bad feeling, no malice, no rancour, no littleness in his countenance, beautiful with a man's best beauty, even in its depression. When I placed his chair at the table, which I hastened to do, anticipating the servant, and when I handed him his tea, which I did with trembling care, he said: "Thank you, Lucy," in as kindly a tone of his full pleasant voice as ever my ear welcomed.
flattery would be worse than vain; there is no consolation in flattery.
The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.
I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon.
I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful, happy accent.
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs. 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.
Strange that grief should now almost choke me, because another human being's eye has failed to greet mine.
But I feel this, Helen: I must dislike those who, whatever I do to please them, persist in disliking me; I must resist those who punish me unjustly. It is as natural as that I should love those who show me affection, or submit to punishment when I feel it is deserved.
It is good to be attracted out of ourselves, to be forced to take a near view of the sufferings, the privations, the efforts, the difficulties of others.
Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength.
I have no wish to talk nonsense." "If you did, it would be in such a grave, quiet manner, I should mistake it for sense.
Human beings must love something, and, in the dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now to remember with what absurd sincerity I doated on this little toy, half fancying it alive and capable of sensation. I could not sleep unless it was folded in my night-gown; and when it lay there safe and warm, I was comparatively happy, believing it to be happy likewise.
Great pains were taken to hide chains with flowers
I only want an easy mind, sir; not crushed by crowded obligations.
At heart, he could not abide sense in women: he liked to see them as silly, as light-headed, as vain, as open to ridicule as possible; because they were then in reality what he held them to be, and wished them to be,--inferior: toys to play with, to amuse a vacant hour and to be thrown away.
I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last.
Old maids like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and the rich.
You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this - if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to new.
... and she held out a pretty gold ring. 'Put it,' she said, 'on the fourth finger of my left hand, and I am yours and you are mine; and we shall leave Earth and make our own Heaven yonder.'
What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me.
Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now. She will never suffer more in this world. She is gone after a hard, short conflict...Yes there is no Emily in time or on earth now. Yesterday we put her poor, wasted, mortal frame quietly under the chancel pavement. We are very calm at present. Why shoud we be otherwise? The anguish of seeing her suffer is over; the spectacle of the pains of death is gone by; the funeral day is past. We feel she is at peace. No need now to trouble for the hard frost and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them.
Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd's can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.
My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world - the ... affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other.
For I too liked reading, thought of a frivolous and childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend the serious or substantial.
Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is around us, for it is everywhere; and those spirits watch us, for they are commissioned to gaurd us; and if we were dying in pain and shame, if scorn smote us on all sides, and hatred crushed us, angels see our tortures, recognize our innocence, and God waits ony a speration of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward.
A Christmas frost had come at midsummer; a white December storm had whirled over June; ice glazed the ripe apples, drifts crushed the blowing roses; on hayfield and cornfield lay a frozen shroud: lanes which last night blushed full of flowers, to-day were pathless with untrodden snow; and the woods, which twelve hours since waved leafy and flagrant as groves between the tropics, now spread, waste, wild, and white as pine-forests in wintry Norway.
But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?-I believe; I have faith: I am going to God.-Where is God? What is God?-My maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created. I rely implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to Him, reveal Him to me.
[O]ur honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.
I Believe she thought I had forgotten my station; and yours, sir.' 'Station! Station!-- your station is in my heart, and on the necks of those who would insult you, now or hereafter.
Daydreams are the delusions of the devil.
I can but die... and I believe in God. Let me try and wait His will in silence.
Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning.
Of late years an abundant shower of curates has fallen upon the North of England.
Your station is in my heart, and on the necks of those who would insult you.
...it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.
Nervous alarms should always be communicated, that they may be dissipated.
Jane! will you hear reason?' (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear) 'because, if you won't, I'll try violence.
He is not to them what he is to me.
Mademoiselle is a fairy," he said, whispering mysteriously.
I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you. And if you were to leave I'm afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I'd take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you'd forget me.
For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the degradation of charity.
I am anchored on a resolve you cannot shake. My heart, my conscience shall dispose of my hand - they only. Know this at last.
Love me, then, or hate me, as you will," I said at last, "you have my full and free forgiveness: ask now for God's, and be at peace.
Sir,' I interrupted him, 'you are inexorable for that unfortunate lady; you speak of her with hate --- with vindictive antipathy. It is cruel --- she cannot help being mad.
The word book acted as a transient stimulus
I mean that I value vision, and dread being struck stone blind.
When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were - large, brilliant, and black.
As to the thoughts, they are elfish. Those eyes in the Evening Star you must have seen in a dream.
Do you like him much?' I told you I liked him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much: he is full of faults.' Is he?' All boys are.
Fortune is proverbially called changeful, yet her caprice often takes the form of repeating again and again a similar stroke of luck in the same quarter.
There are certain phrases potent to make my blood boil -- improper influence! What old woman's cackle is that?" "Are you a young lady?" "I am a thousand times better: I am an honest woman, and as such I will be treated.
Jane Eyre "I desired more...than was within my reach. Who blames me? Many call me discontented. I couldn't help it: the restlessness is in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.
I could not answer the ceaseless inward question-why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of-I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.
Good fortune opens the hand as well as the heart wonderfully; and to give somewhat when we have largely received, but to afford a vent to the unusual ebullition of the sensations.
I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here.
Wise people say it is folly to think anybody perfect; and as to likes and dislikes, we should be friendly to all, and worship none
[I]n his presence I thoroughly lived.
After a youth and manhood passed half in unutterable misery and half in dreary solitude, I have for the first time found what I can truly love--I have found you.
It is a long way off, sir" "From what Jane?" "From England and from Thornfield: and ___" "Well?" "From you, sir
I grant an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the gentleman, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be:Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a flip.
Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.
Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life.
Reader, I literally married him.
Jane Austin was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman. If this is heresy, I cannot help it.
Everyone else is just cocktails.
I loved him very much - more than I could trust myself to say - more than words had power to express." - Jane Eyre
― Charlotte Bronte Quotes
Chief Editor
Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
