Charlotte Brontë quotes - page 2

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. (Charlotte Brontë)
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends! View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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? View quote
Charlotte Brontë
There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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)
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
I can but die... and I believe in God. Let me try and wait His will in silence. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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? View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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 Brontë)
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? View quote
Charlotte Brontë
All these relics gave... Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, - all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë
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. View quote
Charlotte Brontë