Quotes from Charlotte Bronte

What tale do you like best to hear?' 'Oh, I have not much choice! They generally run on the same theme - courtship; and promise to end in the same catastrophe - marriage.

As far as my experience of matrimony goes -- I think it tends to draw you out of, and away from yourself.

If there is one notion I hate more than another, it is that of marriage - I mean marriage in the vulgar, weak sense, as a mere matter of sentiment.

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

Men, in general, are a sort of scum, very different to anything of which you have an idea.

Besides this earth, and besides the race of men, there is an invisible world and a kingdom of spirits: that world is round us, for it is everywhere.

Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties.

Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags.

No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.

Remorse is the poison of life.

Rapidly, merrily, Life's sunny hours flit by, Gratefully, cheerily Enjoy them as they fly!

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.

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

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

If men could see us as we really are, they would be a little amazed; but the cleverest, the acutest men are often under an illusion about women: they do not read them in a true light: they misapprehend them, both for good and evil: their good woman is a queer thing, half doll, half angel; their bad woman almost always a fiend.

Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star.

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.

If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust; the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse. When we are struck at without a reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should -- so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.

I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.

My bride is here ... because my equal is here, and my likeness.

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

Unromantic as Monday morning.

We wove a web in childhood,A web of sunny air.

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