Charlotte Brontë Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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!

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

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!

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

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

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

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--the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

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.

And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.

Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.

You are human and fallible.

Misery generates hate.

Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

Your will shall decide your destiny.

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.

Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.

You, Jane, I must have you for my own--entirely my own.

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 --

I stood lonely enough, but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed: it did not oppress me much.

Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor --thank Heaven!--always Storm.

I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon.

Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes.

Strange that grief should now almost choke me, because another human being's eye has failed to greet mine.

Jane! will you hear reason?' (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear) 'because, if you won't, I'll try violence.

The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.

[O]ur honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.

Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.

Make my happiness--I will make yours.

As far as my experience of matrimony goes -- I think it tends to draw you out of, and away from yourself.

I mentally shake hands with you for your answer, despite its inaccuracy." Mr. Rochester

Unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules.

Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.

His veins were dark with a vivid belladonna tincture, the essence of jealousy.

Youth is gone -- gone -- and will never come back: can't help it.

The world, I soon learned, held a different estimate: and I make no doubt, the world is very right in its view, yet believe also that I am not quite wrong in mine.

the horizon bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white.

I was not heroic enough to purchase liberty at the price of caste.

...would not exchange this one little English girl for the Grand Turk’s whole seraglio, gazelle-eyes, houri forms, and all!

He did not yet known how many commenced lefe-romances are doomed never to get beyond the first, or at most the second chapter.

How can it be that Jane is with me, and says she loves me? Will she not depart as suddenly as she came? To-morrow, I fear I shall find her no more.