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Charlotte Brontë Quotes: 44

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

    Jane Eyre

  • I would always rather be happy than dignified.

    Jane Eyre

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

    Jane Eyre

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

    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.

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

  • 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.

    Jane Eyre

  • 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.

    Jane Eyre

  • 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.

    Jane Eyre

  • 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!

    Jane Eyre

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

    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.

    Jane Eyre

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

    Jane Eyre

  • 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.

    Jane Eyre

  • 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.

    Jane Eyre

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

    The Letters of Charlotte Brontë

  • 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.

    Jane Eyre

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

    Jane Eyre

  • Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.

    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.

    Jane Eyre

  • 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.

    Jane Eyre

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

    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?

    Jane Eyre

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

    Jane Eyre

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

  • 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.

    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.

    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.

    Jane Eyre

  • 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.

    Villette

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

    Jane Eyre

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

    Villette

  • God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.

    Shirley

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

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

    Jane Eyre

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

    Jane Eyre

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.

    Jane Eyre

  • 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.

    Villette

  • I write because I cannot NOT write.

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

  • 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.

    Jane Eyre

  • My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something: trivial, transitory though the deed was, it was yet an active thing, and I was weary of an existence all passive.

    Jane Eyre

  • ...[M]y inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose. I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.

    Villette