Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

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 firm there, firm as weeds among stones.

— Charlotte Bronte

The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.

— Charlotte Bronte

The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!

— Charlotte Bronte

I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance — what I have always said in theory — Wait God's will.

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

If you like poetry let it be first-rate; Milton, Shakespeare, Thomson, Goldsmith, Pope (if you will, though I don't admire him), Scott, Byron, Camp[b]ell, Wordsworth, and Southey. Now don't be startled at the names of Shakespeare and Byron. Both these were great men, and their works are like themselves. You will know how to choose the good and avoid the evil; the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting, you will never wish to read them over twice.

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

You ask about Queen Victoria's visit to Brussels. I saw her for an instant flashing through the Rue Royale in a carriage and six, surrounded by soldiers. She was laughing and talking very gaily. She looked a little stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed, not much dignity or pretension about her. The Belgians liked her very well on the whole. They said she enlivened the sombre court of King Leopold, which is usually as gloomy as a conventicle.

— Charlotte Bronte

What is this Hebrew Christ? To me unknown,In my eyes makes Olympian glory dim.

— Charlotte Bronte

But two miles more, and then we rest!We safely may delay.

— Charlotte Bronte

There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.

— Charlotte Bronte

Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves in my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.

— Charlotte Bronte

It seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control.

— Charlotte Bronte

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 Bronte

If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust; the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should — so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.

— Charlotte Bronte

It is not violence that best overcomes hate — nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury. …\xa0Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how he acts — make his word your rule, and his conduct your example. … Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you.

— Charlotte Bronte

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 Bronte

I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last.

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

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 Bronte

And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first it recoiled baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood — the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth: and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos.

— Charlotte Bronte

By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.

— Charlotte Bronte

It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted.

— Charlotte Bronte

I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach.

— Charlotte Bronte

I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.

— Charlotte Bronte

I don't think, sir, that you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.

— Charlotte Bronte

I envy your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure — an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?

— Charlotte Bronte

The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.

— Charlotte Bronte

It is one of my faults, that though my tongue is sometimes prompt enough at an answer, there are times when it sadly fails me in framing an excuse; and always the lapse occurs at some crisis, when a facile word or plausible pretext is specially wanted to get me out of painful embarrassment.

— Charlotte Bronte

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 Bronte

My bride is here... because my equal is here, and my likeness.

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

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 Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

I scorn your idea of love," I could not help saying, as I rose up and stood before him, leaning my back against the rock. "I scorn the counterfeit sentiment you offer; yes, St. John, and I scorn you when you offer it.

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

God did not give me my life to throw away.

— Charlotte Bronte

I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before: it seemed in me — not in the external world. I asked, was it a mere nervous impression — a delusion? I could not conceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration.

— Charlotte Bronte

Reader, I married him.

— Charlotte Bronte

If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. 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.

— Charlotte Bronte

I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.

— Charlotte Bronte

This is a terrible hour, but it is often that darkest point which precedes the rise of day; that turn of the year when the icy January wind carries over the waste at once the dirge of departing winter, and the prophecy of coming spring.

— Charlotte Bronte

Old maids like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and the rich.

— Charlotte Bronte

Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star.

— Charlotte Bronte

If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep inflicted lacerations never heal - cutting injuries and insults of serrated and poison-dripping edge - so, too, there are consolations of tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their echo: caressing kindnesses - loved, lingered over through a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself.

— Charlotte Bronte

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.

— Charlotte Bronte

I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.

— Charlotte Bronte

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 Bronte

Monsieur, sit down; listen to me. I am not a heathen, I am not hard-hearted, I am not unchristian, I am not dangerous, as they tell you; I would not trouble your faith; you believe in God and Christ and the Bible, and so do I.

— Charlotte Bronte

There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.

— Charlotte Bronte

What animal magnetism drew thee and me together—I know not.

— Charlotte Bronte

My God, whose son, as on this night, took on Him the form of man, and for man vouchsafed to suffer and bleed, controls thy hand, and without His behest, thou canst not strike a stroke. My God is sinless, eternal, all-wise, and in Him is my trust, and though stripped and crushed by thee, -though naked, desolate, void of resource- I do not despair:where the lance of Guthrum now wet with my blood, I should not despair. I watch, I toil, I hope, I pray: Jehovah, in His own time, will aid.

— Charlotte Bronte

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

— Charlotte Bronte

Unlawful pleasure, trenching on another’s rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure—its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave forever.

— Charlotte Bronte

I tell you, Mr. Hunsden, you are a more unpractical man than I am an unpractical woman, for you don't acknowledge what really exists; you want to annihilate individual patriotism and national greatness as an atheist would annihilate God and his own soul, by denying their existence.

— Charlotte Bronte

Better to be without logic than without feeling.

— Charlotte Bronte

Against slavery all right thinkers revolt, and though torture be the price of resistance, torture must be dared: though the only road to freedom lie through the gates of death, those gates must be passed; for freedom is indispensable.

— Charlotte Bronte