Quotes from Charlotte Bronte

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

It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience. God has given us, in a measure, the power to make our own fate.

A beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance.

I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little.

Her coming was my hope each day, Her parting was my pain; The chance that did her steps delay Was ice in every vein.

If he were insane, however, his was a very cool and collected insanity.

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

Flirting is a womans trade, one must keep in practice.

The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.

...it strikes me with terror and anguish to feel I absolutely must be torn from you for ever. I see the necessity of departure; and it is like looking on the necessity of death.

Talented people almost always know full well the excellence that is in them.

Oh, I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy.

To see and know the worst is to take from Fear her main advantage.

Remorse is the poison of life.

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

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

What necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer-the Future so much brighter?

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.

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.