Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre (1847)

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What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart... 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.

Charlotte Brontë
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Charlotte Brontë
I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

Charlotte Brontë
You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.

Charlotte Brontë
I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be happy than dignified.

Charlotte Brontë
If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

Charlotte Brontë
It is vain to say that human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Charlotte Brontë
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

Charlotte Brontë
There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.

Charlotte Brontë
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.

Charlotte Brontë
I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest — blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine.

Charlotte Brontë
Most true is it that "beauty is in the eye of the gazer." My master's colourless, olive face, square, massive brow, broad and jetty eyebrows, deep eyes, strong features, firm, grim mouth, — all energy, decision, will, — were not beautiful, according to rule; but they were more than beautiful to me; they were full of an interest, an influence that quite mastered me, — that took my feelings from my own power and fettered them in his. I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

Charlotte Brontë
As his curate, his comrade, all would be right…But as his wife…forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry…this would be unendurable.
Jane, of St John Rivers

Charlotte Brontë
A waft of wind came sweeping down the laurel-walk, and trembled through the boughs of the chestnut: it wandered away-away-to an indefinite distance-it died. The nightingale's song was then the only voice of the hour: in listening to it, I again wept.

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 but die... and I believe in God. Let me try and wait His will in silence.

Charlotte Brontë
The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.

Charlotte Brontë
And she held out a pretty gold ring. 'Put it,' she said, 'on the fourth finger of my left hand, and I am yours and you are mine; and we shall leave Earth and make our own Heaven yonder.'

Charlotte Brontë
I ask you to pass through life at my side—to be my second self, and best earthly companion.

Charlotte Brontë
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.

Charlotte Brontë
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs. With this creed, revenge never worries my heart, degradation never too deeply disgusts me, injustice never crushes me too low. I live in calm, looking to the end.

Charlotte Brontë
I am glad you are no relation of mine. I will never call you aunt as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick.

Charlotte Brontë
You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not: I need not ask you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it.

Charlotte Brontë
All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.

Charlotte Brontë
Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.

Charlotte Brontë