Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Quotes

• “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 ...”
• “Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as...”
• “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as mu...”
• “We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread ...”
• “I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there de...”
• “I am not an angel,' I asserted; 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither exp...”
• “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 expressio...”
• “I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen mor...”
• “Jane, be still; don't struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.""I am n...”
• “Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and ...”
• “Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a fl...”
• “I have little left in myself -- I must have you. The world may laugh -- may call me absurd, selfish -- but it does not s...”
• “My help had been needed and claimed; I had given it: I was pleased to have done something: trivial, transitory though th...”
• “I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest -- blest beyond...”
• “Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or ferti...”
• “Feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morse...”
• “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it i...”
• “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...”
• “There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition t...”
• “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
• “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”
• “And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.”
• “The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter - in the eye.”
• “Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”
• “[O]ur honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.”
• “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
• “Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
• “To talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.”
• “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
• “Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine.”