Charlotte Bronte Quotes
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I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they had nor could have sympathy with anything in me.
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Arraigned at my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night-- of the general state of mind which I have indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told in her own quiet way , a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rabidly devoured the ideal;-- I pronounced judgment to this effect:-- 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 the poison as if it were nectar.
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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.
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You transfix me quite.
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Friendship however is a plant which cannot be forced -- true friendship is no gourd spring up in a night and withering in a day.
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Beauty is in the eye of the gazer.
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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.
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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.
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I would not be you for a kingdom.' The remark was too naïve to rouse anger; I merely said - 'Very good.' 'And what would you give to be ME?' she inquired. 'Not a bad sixpence - strange as it may sound', I replied. 'You are but a poor creature.' 'You don't think so in your heart.' 'No; for in my heart you have not the outline of a place: I only occasionally turn you over in my brain.
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And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.
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My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.
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God did not give me my life to throw it away.
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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.
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Remorse is the poison of life.
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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.
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My rest might have been blissful enough, only a sad heart broke it.
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Great pains were taken to hide chains with flowers...
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While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I enjoyed!
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Reader, I married him.
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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 is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.
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What the deuce is to do now?
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That to begin with; let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure.
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Reader, I literally married him.
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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.