CHARLOTTE BRONTË QUOTES II

English novelist (1816-1855)

To see and know the worst is to take from Fear her main advantage.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Villette


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

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Jane Eyre


The cool peace and dewy sweetness of the night filled me with a mood of hope: not hope on any definite point, but a general sense of encouragement and heart-ease.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Villette


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 BRONTË

Villette


Enjoy the blessings Heaven bestows,
Assist his friends, forgive his foes;
Trust God, and keep his statutes still,
Upright and firm, through good and ill;
Thankful for all that God has given,
Fixing his firmest hopes on heaven;
Knowing that earthly joys decay,
But hoping through the darkest day.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

"Vanitas Vanitatum, Omnia Vanitas"


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

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

attributed, Complete Novels of the Bronte Sisters


We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Jane Eyre


I believe that creature is a changeling: she is a perfect cabinet of oddities.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Villette


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 BRONTË

The Professor


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

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Jane Eyre

Tags: happiness


Is not the real experience of each individual very limited? And, if a writer dwells upon that solely or principally, is he not in danger of repeating himself, and also of becoming an egotist? Then, too, imagination is a strong, restless faculty, which claims to be heard and exercised: are we to be quite deaf to her cry, and insensate to her struggles? When she shows us bright pictures, are we never to look at them, and try to reproduce them? And when she is eloquent, and speaks rapidly and urgently in our ear, are we not to write to her dictation?

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

letter to G. H. Lewes, November 6, 1847


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 BRONTË

Villette


Life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

The Letters of Charlotte Bronte


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

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Jane Eyre


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

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

The Professor


Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Villette


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 BRONTË

Villette


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

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Villette


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

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

Jane Eyre


We wove a web in childhood,
A web of sunny air;
We dug a spring in infancy
Of water pure and fair;
We sowed in youth a mustard seed,
We cut an almond rod;
We are now grown up to riper age--
Are they withered in the sod?

CHARLOTTE BRONTË

"From Retrospection"