Charlotte Brontë Quotes

278 Sourced Quotes

Oh madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children's mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!

Charlotte Brontë
I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree: he is more my own. [... ] Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered—not uttered till; when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some!

Charlotte Brontë
Better to be without logic than without feeling.

Charlotte Brontë
I think I must admit so fair a guest when it asks entrance to my heart.

Charlotte Brontë
What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me.

Charlotte Brontë
You — you strange — you almost unearthly thing! — I love as my own flesh. You — poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are — I entreat to accept me as a husband.

Charlotte Brontë
My home is humble and unattractive to strangers, but to me it contains what I shall find nowhere else in the world — the... affection which brothers and sisters feel for each other.

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

Charlotte Brontë
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.

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

Charlotte Brontë
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.

Charlotte Brontë
Jane, I never meant to wound you thus...Will you ever forgive me?" Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.

Charlotte Brontë
"Are you anything akin to me, do you think, Jane?"
I could risk no sort of answer by this time; my heart was full.
"Because," he said, "I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you — especially when you are near to me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous Channel, and two hundred miles or so of land, come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapped; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly."

Charlotte Brontë
It is a happy thing that time quells the longings of vengeance and hushes the promptings of rage and aversion. I had left this woman in bitterness and hate, and I came back to her now with no other emotion than a sort of ruth for her great sufferings, and strong yearning to forget and forgive all injuries - to be reconciled and clasp hands in amity.

Charlotte Brontë
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.

Charlotte Brontë
Talented people almost always know full well the excellence that is in them.

Charlotte Brontë
Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.

Charlotte Brontë
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.

Charlotte Brontë
To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company. We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.

Charlotte Brontë
Life is still life, whatever its pangs; our eyes and ears and their use remain with us, though the prospect of what pleases be wholly withdrawn, and the sound of what consoles must be silenced.

Charlotte Brontë
If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.

Charlotte Brontë
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.

Charlotte Brontë
A depressing and difficult passage has prefaced every new page I have turned in life.

Charlotte Brontë
I don't call you handsome, sir, though I love you most dearly: far too dearly to flatter you. Don't flatter me.

Charlotte Brontë
But afterwards, is there nothing more for me in life - no true home - nothing to be dearer to me than myself?

Charlotte Brontë
Life is so constructed that the event does not, cannot, will not, meet the expectation.

Charlotte Brontë
Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.

Charlotte Brontë
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.

Charlotte Brontë
I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman.

Charlotte Brontë
Gentle, soft dream, nestling in my arms now, you will fly, too, as your sisters have all fled before you: but kiss me before you go—embrace me, Jane.

Charlotte Brontë