Charlotte Bronté
"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs."
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
"The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely."
-Charlotte Bronté,
"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel."
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
"I ask you to pass through life at my side to be my second self, and my best earthly companion."
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
"Love is real - the most real, the most lasting, the sweetest and yet the bitterest thing we know."
-Charlotte Bronté, Shirley
"I mean that I value vision, and dread being struck stone blind."
-Charlotte Bronté, Villette
"Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste."
-Charlotte Bronté,
"If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscious approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends."
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
"Reader, I married him."
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
"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 there, firm as weeds among stones."
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
"I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me."
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
"Flirting is a woman's trade, one must keep in practice."
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
"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."
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“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.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“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?”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“I am not an angel," I asserted; "and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“Am I hideous, Jane?
Very, sir: you always were, you know.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“He was the first to recognize me, and to love what he saw.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“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.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“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.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“He is not to them what he is to me," I thought: "he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine- I am sure he is- I feel akin to him- I understand the language of his countenance and movements: though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“I have now been married ten years. I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest - blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward's society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together. To be together is for us to be at once free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character - perfect concord is the result.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself,
than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all
connected with you.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“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.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“I'll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“What necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer-the Future so much brighter?”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“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?”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“Jane, I never meant to wound you thus...Will you ever forgive me?"
Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
“Because, he said, “I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you – especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land some broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, – you’d forget me.”
-Charlotte Bronté, Jane Eyre
