Charlotte Brontë > Quotes

“profoundly esteem the one, and freely forgive the other.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women just feel as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking - a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony; a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet he stoops and drinks divine draughts nonetheless.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
― Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre

“Est ce assez de distance?” he demanded. “Monsieur en est l’arbitre,” said I. “Vous savez bien que non. C’est vous qui avez crée ce vide immense: moi je n’y ai pas mis la main.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“What a consternation of soul was mine that dreary afternoon!  How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection!  Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought!  I could not answer the ceaseless inward question—why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of—I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I walked fast through the room: I stopped, half suffocated with the thoughts that rose faster and faster than I could receive, comprehend, settle them: thoughts of what might, could, would, and should be, and that ere long.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If you wish me to love you, could you but see how
much I do love you, you would be proud and content.
All my heart is yours: it belongs to you; and with you
it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from
your presence for ever.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: The Original 1847 Edition With Illustrations

“Quero o impossível das coisas inaudíveis.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“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, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“It is not violence that best overcomes hate—nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“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; 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. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“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. As for you—you’d forget me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“You most wish to retain when you are most certain to lose.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“What fresh hell is this?”
― Charlotte Brontë

“Several wealthy and benevolent individuals in the county subscribed largely for the erection of a more convenient building in a better situation; new regulations were made; improvements in diet and clothing introduced; the funds of the school were intrusted to the management of a committee. Mr. Brocklehurst, who, from his wealth and family connections, could not be overlooked, still retained the post of treasurer; but he was aided in the discharge of his duties by gentlemen of rather more enlarged and sympathising minds: his office of inspector, too, was shared by those who knew how to combine reason with strictness, comfort with economy, compassion with uprightness. The school, thus improved, became in time a truly useful and noble institution.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: The Original 1847 Unabridged and Complete Edition

“I lingered at the gates; I lingered on the lawn; I paced backwards and forwards on the pavement: the shutters of the glass door were closed; I could not see into the interior; and both my eyes and spirit seemed drawn from the gloomy house—from the grey hollow filled with rayless cells, as it appeared to me—to that sky expanded before me,—a blue sea absolved from taint of cloud; the moon ascending it in solemn march; her orb seeming to look up as she left the hill tops, from behind which she had come, far and farther below her, and aspired to the zenith, midnight-dark in its fathomless depth and measureless distance: and for those trembling stars that followed her course; they made my heart tremble, my veins glow when I viewed them. Little things recall us to earth: the clock struck in the hall; that sufficed; I turned from moon and stars, opened a side-door, and went in.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Not a human being that ever lived could wish to be loved better than I was loved; and him who thus loved me I absolutely worshipped:”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“And was Mr. Rochester now ugly in my eyes? No, reader: gratitude, and many associations, all pleasurable and genial, made his face the object I best liked to see; his presence in a room was more cheering than the brightest fire. Yet I had not forgotten his faults; indeed, I could not, for he brought them frequently before me. He was proud, sardonic, harsh to inferiority of every description: in my secret soul I knew that his great kindness to me was balanced by unjust severity to many others. He was moody, too; unaccountably so; I more than once, when sent for to read to him, found him sitting in his library alone, with his head bent on his folded arms; and, when he looked up, a morose, almost a malignant, scowl blackened his features. But I believed that his moodiness, his harshness, and his former faults of morality (I say former, for now he seemed corrected of them) had their source in some cruel cross of fate. I believed he was naturally a man of better tendencies, higher principles, and purer tastes than such as circumstances had developed, education instilled, or destiny encouraged. I thought there were excellent materials in him; though for the present they hung together somewhat spoiled and tangled. I cannot deny that I grieved for his grief, whatever that was, and would have given much to assuage it.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I am no bird and no net ensnared me. I am a free human being , with independent will which I now exert to leave you.”
― Charlotte Brontë

“Omong kosong! Dan bagaimana warisan seperti ini akan memengaruhimu? Apakah uang itu akan bisa membujukmu agar tetap di Inggris, menikahi Miss Oliver, dan berkeluarga dengan tenteram seperti manusia biasa?”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If all the world hated you, and believe you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“I have for the first time found what I can truly love – I have found you. 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 centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you – and kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“If few women have suffered as I did in his loss, few have enjoyed what I did in his love.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Villette

“Love can excuse anything except meanness; but meanness kills love, cripples even natural affection; without esteem true love cannot exist.”
― Charlotte Brontë, The Brontës Complete Works

“The sternest-seeming stoic is human after all.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Women feel just as men feel... It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“John no one thwarted, much less punished; though he twisted the necks of the pigeons, killed the little pea-chicks,”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre