Charlotte Brontë was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. She enlisted in school at Roe Head in January 1831, aged 14 years. These Charlotte Bronte quotes will motivate you.
Best Charlotte Bronte Quotes
- “What you want to ignite in others must first burn inside yourself.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “The shadows are as important as the light.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
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“Better to be without logic than without feeling.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “A great deal; you are good to those who are good to you. It is all I ever desire to be. 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.” ~ Charlotte Bronte Quotes
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“I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “God did not give me my life to throw it away.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Men judge us by the success of our efforts. God looks at the efforts themselves.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
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“I would always rather be happy than dignified.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Human beings must have action, and they will make it if they cannot find it.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well!” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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!” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Oh! that gentleness! how far more potent is it than force!” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “You are human and fallible.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
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“That to begin with; let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Friendship however is a plant which cannot be forced — true friendship is no gourd spring up in a night and withering in a day.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Remorse is the poison of life.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “To you, I am neither man nor woman. I come before you as an author only. It is the sole standard by which you have a right to judge me–the sole ground on which I accept your judgment.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Talented people almost always know full well the excellence that is in them.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “You know full well as I do the value of sisters’ affections: There is nothing like it in this world.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Youth has its romance, and maturity its wisdom, as morning and spring have their freshness, noon and summer their power, night and winter their repose. Each attribute is good in its own season.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
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“I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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 presence forever.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
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“A depressing and difficult passage has prefaced every page I have turned in life.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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 mold, and tilled with manure.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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 mold, and tilled with manure.” ~ Charlotte Bronte Quotes
- “Men, in general, are a sort of scum, very different to anything of which you have an idea.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperienced?” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Rapidly, merrily, Life’s sunny hours flit by, Gratefully, cheerily Enjoy them as they fly!” ~ Charlotte Bronte
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“Look twice before you leap.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “You never felt jealousy, did you, Miss Eyre? Of course not: I need not ask you; because you never felt love. You have both sentiments yet to experience: your soul sleeps; the shock is yet to be given which shall waken it.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
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“The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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 expect nor exact anything celestial of me – for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “I have little left in myself — I must have you. The world may laugh — may call me absurd, selfish — but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “The charm of variety there was not, nor the excitement of incident; but I liked peace so well, and sought stimulus so little, that when the latter came I almost felt it a disturbance, and rather still wished it had held aloof.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “Jane, be still; don’t struggle so like a wild, frantic bird, that is rending its own plumage in its desperation.” “I am no bird, and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master–something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. He may lay down rules and devise principles, and to rules and principles it will perhaps for years lie in subjection; and then, haply without any warning of revolt, there comes a time when it will no longer consent.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “I had not seen “Pride and Prejudice,” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
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“It is a pity that doing one’s best does not always answer.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “My hopes were all dead — struck with a subtle doom, such as, in one night, fell on all the first-born in the land of Egypt. I looked on my cherished wishes, yesterday so blooming and glowing; they lay stark, chill, livid corpses that could never revive.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “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.” ~ Charlotte Bronte Quotes
- “There is, I am convinced, no picture that conveys in all its dreadfulness, a vision of sorrow, despairing, remediless, supreme. If I could paint such a picture, the canvas would show only a woman looking down at her empty arms.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
- “The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter – often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter – in the eye.” ~ Charlotte Bronte
