Charlotte Brontë Quotes

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

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

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.

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

Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you!

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 agised 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.

I have little left in myself - I must have you. The world may laugh - may call me absurd, selfish - but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.

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.

It does good to no woman to be flattered [by a man] who does not intend to marry her; and it is madness in all 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, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds whence there is no extrication.

I knew, you would do me good, in some way, at some time;- I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not- (again he stopped)- did not (he proceeded hastily) strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing.

Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor -thank Heaven!-always Storm.

I write because I cannot NOT write.

To you I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me-the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.

You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme - and when you so give yourself - you lose appetite ans sleep - it cannot be helped -

My world had for some years been Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.

One suffers in silence so long as one has the strength and when that strength fails one speaks without measuring one's words much.

Where the bodily presence is weak and the speech contemptible, surely there cannot be error in making written language the medium of better utterance than faltering lips can achieve?

Something real, cool, and solid, lies before you something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.

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.

He made me love him without looking at me.