Charlotte Bronte Quotes

I am no bird, and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will.

I am lonely, yet not everybody will do. I don’t know why, some people fill the gaps and others emphasize my loneliness.

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.

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

To be much alone, to fail in company to have no superiors or equals to consult with in difficulty pour out one’s feelings to relieve one’s cares by confiding them–in short to do all without fuel or witness, I have sometimes thought would be happiness beyond that which man and woman as generally constituted can know.

I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.

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.

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.

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

The heart has its own language. The heart knows a hundred thousand ways to speak.

Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

I have no personal experience of the evil that you have represented as growing out of the state of things at Lowood. Facts such as you have related are to me awful, because they are true. I have no sympathy in vulgar grief: contemporary suffering always appeared to me more bearable than breakdowns of one’s spirit, and transient misfortunes.”

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel… They suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

Nothing so unbelievable as to marry for love? Does the novelist not believe in that? Women marry men hoping to change them. Men marry women hoping they’ll never change. Where’s the romance?

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter – often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter – in the eye.

You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense.

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue.

I am a gentleman’s daughter; poverty and privation are hard to bear, but they will not kill me.

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.

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women.

The human heart has hidden treasures…advantages we can bring to light only by peeling off its outward layers.

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.

You are my sympathy–my better self–my good angel–I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my center and spring of life, wraps my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.

I’m not an angel, I asserted. And I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.

It is not violence that best overcomes hate – nor vengeance that most surely heals injury.

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.

Happiness is the cure – a cheerful mind the preventative: cultivate both.

If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship we must love our friend for their sake rather than for our own.

No sight so sad as that of a naughty child, he began, especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death? They go to hell, was my ready and orthodox answer. And what is hell? Can you tell me that? A pit full of fire. And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever? No, sir. What must you do to avoid it? I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: I must keep in good health and not die.

I am not an angel,’ I asserted; ’and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.

How does your book get on?…Make haste and tell me it is mine. I have waited eagerly for it ever since I finished Jane Eyre…

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.

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.

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

A love that would support lifes trials while building a life of its own.

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love our friends for their sakes rather than for our own.

Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.

If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves.

She never knew how deeply those things hurt me, I feel I have not the strength to remember them and so I cannot bring myself to speak of them. Affordable Web Design in Birmingham by Kalexiko

The eyes were large and mild; and–this may seem egotism on my part—radiant whatever expression they conveyed, that expression happened to be. I was not surprised, when I came within earshot, to hear him say— Is it Jane? What is she like?” I had rather be myself alone. I had meant to give her but one kiss, but when pressed, I delivered a second. Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you – especially when you are near 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 snapt I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me. “Should the meanest thing alive slap me on the cheek, I’d not only turn the other, but I’d ask pardon for provoking it. 46. “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.” 47. “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 revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.” 48. “You have no problem, can exist on your original plan, and not deviate minutely.” 49. “I am glad you are no relation of mine. I will never call you aunt again as long as I live. I will never come to visit you when I am grown up; and if any one asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick, and that you treated me with miserable cruelty.” 50. “I’m not an angel,’ I asserted ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.” These are just a few examples of the many insightful and thought-provoking quotes from Charlotte Bronte. Her words continue to resonate with readers, offering profound insights into human nature, relationships, and the pursuit of personal freedom and happiness.