Charlotte Bronte Quotes
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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.
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There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.
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To women who please me only by their faces, I am the very devil when I find out they have neither souls nor hearts — when they open to me a perspective of flatness, triviality, and perhaps imbecility, coarseness, and ill-temper: but to the clear eye and eloquent tongue, to the soul made of fire, and the character that bends but does not break — at once supple and stable, tractable and consistent — I am ever tender and true.
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A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.
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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.
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Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.
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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.
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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.
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I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!
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I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,--a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.
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You are afraid of me, because I talk like a sphinx.
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I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
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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.
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There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.
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Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive.
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As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to impart all that the brain conceives; though I daresay it would be silent on much the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible, it was never intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of solitude: it is a mouth which should speak much and smile often, and have human affection for its interlocutor.
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But solitude is sadness.' 'Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy lies heart-break.
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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.
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Tact, if it be genuine, never sleeps.
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Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.
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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.
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The hiss of the quenched element, the breakage of the pitcher which I had flung from my hand when I had emptied it, and, above all, the splash of the shower-bath I had liberally bestowed, roused Mr Rochester at last though it was dark, I knew he was awake; because I heard him fulminating strange anathemas at finding himself lying in a pool of water. 'Is there a flood?' he cried...
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No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room: it only gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to this day.
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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.