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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I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance what I have always said in theory - Wait God's will.
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What the deuce is to do now?
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Jane, I never meant to wound you thus...Will you ever forgive me?" Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.
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I grant an ugly woman is a blot on the fair face of creation; but as to the gentleman, let them be solicitous to possess only strength and valour: let their motto be:Hunt, shoot, and fight: the rest is not worth a flip.
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Say whatever your memory suggests is true; but add nothing and exaggerate nothing.
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For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shadows of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature - shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity - but slow degrees I became a frequenter of this straight narrow path.
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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?
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If you don't love another living soul, then you'll never be disappointed.
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My rest might have been blissful enough, only a sad heart broke it.
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Little Jane's love would have been my best reward, without it, my heart is broken.
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Intelligence and proper education will give you independence of spirit.
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I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing.
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We should acknowledge God merciful, but not always for us comprehensible.
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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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The word book acted as a transient stimulus...
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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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I have no wish to talk nonsense." "If you did, it would be in such a grave, quiet manner, I should mistake it for sense.
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One does not jump, and spring, and shout hurrah! at hearing one has got a fortune, one begins to consider responsibilities, and to ponder business; on a base of steady satisfaction rise certain grave cares, and we contain ourselves, and brood over our bliss with a solemn brow.
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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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Jane Austin was a complete and most sensible lady, but a very incomplete and rather insensible (not senseless) woman. If this is heresy, I cannot help it.
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Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere.
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Better to try all things and find all empty, than to try nothing and leave your life a blank.
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I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little.