Charlotte Brontë Quotes

It is a pity that doing one's best does not always answer.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Gratitude is a divine emotion. It fills the heart, not to bursting; it warms it, but not to fever. I like to taste leisurely of bliss. Devoured in haste, I do not know its flavor.

~ Charlotte Brontë

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.

~ Charlotte Brontë

How people feel when they are returning home from an absence, long or short, I did not know: I had never experienced the sensation. I had known what it was to come back to Gateshead when a child after a long walk, to be scolded for looking cold or gloomy; and later, what it was to come back from church to Lowood, to long for a plenteous meal and a good fire, and to be unable to get either. Neither of these returnings was very pleasant or desirable: no magnet drew me to a given point, increasing in its strength of attraction the nearer I came. The return to Thornfield was yet to be tried.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I believe - I daily find it proved - that we can get nothing in this world worth keeping, not so much as a principle or a conviction, except out of purifying flame, or through strengthening peril. We err; we fall; we are humbled - then we walk more carefully. We greedily eat and drink poison out of the gilded cup of vice, or from the beggar's wallet of avarice; we are sickened, degraded; everything good in us rebels against us; our souls rise bitterly indignant against our bodies; there is a period of civil war; if the soul has strength, it conquers and rules thereafter.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution - such is not my taste. I wish to foster, not to blight - to earn gratitude, not to wring tears of blood - no, nor of brine: my harvest must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet.

~ Charlotte Brontë

. . . at eighteen the true narrative of life is yet to becommenced. Before that time we sit listening to a tale, a marvelous fiction, delightful sometimes, and sad sometimes, almost always unreal. Before that time our world is heroic, its inhabitants half-divine or semi-demon; its scenes are dreamscenes; darker woods and stranger hills, brighter skies, more dangerous waters, sweeter flowers, more tempting fruits, wider plains, drearier deserts, sunnier fields than are found in nature, overspread our enchanted globe. What a moon we gaze on before that time! How the trembling of our hearts at her aspect bearswitness to its unutterable beauty!

~ Charlotte Brontë

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

~ Charlotte Brontë

it is madness in al 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 into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.

~ Charlotte Brontë

In her past were sweet passages, in her future rosy hopes.

~ Charlotte Brontë

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

~ Charlotte Brontë

Observe her when she has some knitting, or some other woman's work in hand, and sits the image of peace, calmly intent on her needles and her silk, some discussion meantime going on around her, in the course of which peculiarities of character are being developed, or important interests canvassed; she takes no part in int; her humble, feminine mind is wholl with her knitting; none of her features move; she neither presumes to smile approval, nor frown disapprobation; her little hands assiduously ply their unpretending task; if she can only get this purse finished, or this bonnet-grec completed, it is enough for her.

~ Charlotte Brontë

One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to his dictation, he came and bent over me, and said--Jane, have you a glittering ornament round your neck? I had a gold watch-chain: I answered Yes. And have you a pale blue dress on?I had. He informed me then, that for some time he had fancied the obscurity clouding one eye was becoming less dense; and that now he was sure of it.

~ Charlotte Brontë

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

~ Charlotte Brontë

Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision. Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by: but I shall follow the guiding of that still small voice which interprets the dictates of conscience.

~ Charlotte Brontë

She bit me. She worried me like a tigress, when Rochester got the knife from her...She sucked the blood: she said she'd drain my heart. Richard mason

~ Charlotte Brontë

Existence was never originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me among the rest.

~ Charlotte Brontë

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

~ Charlotte Brontë

My heart almost died within me; miserable longings strained its chords. How long were the September days! How silent, how lifeless!

~ Charlotte Brontë

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.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime, I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last.

~ Charlotte Brontë

It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate: and when our energies seem to demand a sustenance they cannot get--when our will strains after a path we may not follow--we need neither starve from inanition, not stand still in despair: we have but to seek another nourishment for the mind, as strong as the forbidden fruit it longed to taste--and perhaps purer; and to hew out for the adventurous foot a road as direct and broad as the one Fortune has blocked up against us, if rougher than it.

~ Charlotte Brontë

They outnumbered me, and I was worsted and under their feet; but, as yet, I was not dead.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I sat down and tried to rest. I could not; though I had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much excited. A phase of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was being accomplished.

~ Charlotte Brontë

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.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I laughed at him as he said this. “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.

~ Charlotte Brontë

No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a mistake in the choice of his profession, and every man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind and tide before he allows himself to cry out, 'I am baffled!' and submits to be floated passively back to land.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Was I gleeful, settled, content, during the hours I passed in yonder bare, humble schoolroom this morning and afternoon? Not to decieve myself, I must reply -- No: I felt desolate to a degree. I felt -- yes, idiot that I am -- I felt degraded. I doubted I had taken a step which sank instead of raising me in the scale of social existence. I was weakly dismayed at the ignorance, the poverty, the coarseness of all I heard and saw around me. But let me not hate and despise myself too much for these feelings; I know them to be wrong -- that is a great step gained. I shall strive to overcome them.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Some have won a wild delight,By daring wilder sorrow;Could I gain thy love to-night,I'd hazard death to-morrow.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Of an artistic temperament, I deny that I am; yet I must possess something of the artist's faculty of making the most of present pleasure.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I knew I was catching at straws; but in the wide and weltering deep where I found myself, I would have caught at cobwebs.

~ Charlotte Brontë

You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings - I do indeed, I have often thought so - and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange, they are not half sufficiently guarded from temptation - Girls are protected as if they were something very frail and silly indeed while boys are turned loose on the world as if they - of all beings in existence, were the wisest and the least liable to be led astray.

~ Charlotte Brontë

I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night: too serene for the companionship of fear. 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.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still

~ Charlotte Brontë

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined early) the cold winter wind had brought with it clouds so sombre, and a rain so penetrating, that further out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it: I never liked long walks, especially on chilly afternoons: dreadful to me was the coming home in the raw twilight, with nipped fingers and toes, and a heart saddened by the chidings of Bessie, the nurse, humbled by the consciousness of my physical inferiority to Eliza, John, and Georgiana Reed.—Jane EyreFrom Gradesaver.com

~ Charlotte Brontë

Unfeeling thing that I was, the sensibilities of the maternal heart were Greek and Hebrew to me.

~ Charlotte Brontë

Relinquish! What! my vocation? My great work? My foundation laid on earth for a mansion in heaven? My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race - of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance - of substituting peace for war - freedom for bondage - religion for superstition - the hope of heaven for the fear of hell? Must I relinquish that? It is dearer than the blood in my veins. It is what I have to look forward to, and to live for.

~ Charlotte Brontë

He is a good and a great man; but he forgets, pitilessly, the feelings and claims of little people, in pursuing his own large views. It is better, therefore, for the insignificant to keep out of his way, lest, in his progress, he should trample them down.

~ Charlotte Brontë