Charlotte Brontë

"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!"

"Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns. These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is – I repeat it – a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them."

"Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation. 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."

"Our natures own predilections and antipathies alike strange. There are people from whom we secretly shrink, whom we would personally avoid, though reason confesses that they are good people: there are others with faults of temper, &c., evident enough, beside whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good."

"Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine."

"I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes."

"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."

"No reflection was to be allowed now, not one glance was to be cast back; not even one forward. Not one thought was to be given either to the past or the future. The first was a page so heavenly sweet, so deadly sad, that to read one line of it would dissolve my courage and break down my energy. The last was an awful blank, something like then world when the deluge was gone by."

"“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.”"

"And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame."

"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."

"Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive."

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

"Look twice before you leap."

"A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow."

"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."

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

"Men judge us by the success of our efforts. God looks at the efforts themselves."

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

"Memory in youth is active and easily impressible; in old age it is comparatively callous to new impressions, but still retains vividly those of earlier years."