Charlotte Bronte

I don't call you handsome, sir, though I love you most dearly: far too dearly to flatter you. Don't flatter me.

I am always easy of belief when the creed pleases me.

Yet it would be your duty to bear it if you could not avoid it it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.

I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.

Give him enough rope and he will hang himself.

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

Children can feel but they cannot analyse their feelings and if the analysis is partially effected in thought they know not how to express the result of the process in words.

Our honeymoon will shine our life long its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.

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 men could see us as we really are they would be a little amazed.

Conventionality is not morality.

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.

Your will shall decide your destiny.

Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.

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

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

True enthusiasm is a fine feeling whose flash I admire where ever I see it.

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

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.

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

You know full well as I do the value of sisters’ affections; there is nothing like it in this world.

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

True enthusiasm is a fine feeling whose flash I admire where-ever I see it.

Suspense is irksome, disappointment bitter.

The man of regular life and rational mind never despairs.

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!

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.

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

It is vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility; they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.

If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.

A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

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

Remorse is the poison of life.

There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.

It is not violence that best overcomes hate nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.

Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?

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.

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

Who has words at the right moment?

Better to be without logic than without feeling.

I'm just going to write because I cannot help it.

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

Flirting is a womans trade one must keep in practice.

Let your performance do the thinking.

Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.

Look twice before you leap.

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

You know full well as I do the value of sisters' affections: There is nothing like it in this world.

The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter - in the eye.

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

Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties.