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Charlotte Brontë
75 quotes
“I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In response to George Henry Lewes (LL, II, v, 272); Miriam Farris Allott (1974), The Brontës, the critical heritage, page 160;
“I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance — what I have always said in theory — Wait God's will.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: (Referring to marriage). As quoted in Moglen, Helen (1984) Charlotte Brontë: the self conceived, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 235
“If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Carolyn Warner (1992), page 135
“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?”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) first seen 1834 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Ellen Nussey, 4 July 1834.
“I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) first seen 1849 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 15 January, 1849. As quoted in Elizabeth Gaskell The life of Charlotte Brontë (1870), p. 285
“I have twice seen Macready act; once in Macbeth and once in Othello. I astounded a dinner-party by honestly saying I did not like him. It is the fashion to rave about his splendid acting; anything more false and artificial, less genuinely impressive than his whole style, I could scarcely have imagined. The fact is, the stage-system altogether is hollow nonsense. They act farces well enough; the actors comprehend their parts and do them justice. They comprehend nothing about tragedy or Shakespeare, and it is a failure. I said so, and by so saying produced a blank silence, a mute consternation.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Charlotte Brontë, on William Macready. Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle, (by Clement King Shorter) (1896)
“You ask about Queen Victoria's visit to Brussels. I saw her for an instant flashing through the Rue Royale in a carriage and six, surrounded by soldiers. She was laughing and talking very gaily. She looked a little stout, vivacious lady, very plainly dressed, not much dignity or pretension about her. The Belgians liked her very well on the whole. They said she enlivened the sombre court of King Leopold, which is usually as gloomy as a conventicle.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) first seen 1843 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Emily Brontë, (1 December 1843) The life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) by Elizabeth Gaskell.
“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?”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is this Hebrew Christ? To me unknown, His lineage—doctrine—mission—yet how clear, Is God-like goodness, in his actions shewn! How straight and stainless is his life's career! The ray of Deity that rests on him, In my eyes makes Olympian glory dim.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But two miles more, and then we rest! Well, there is still an hour of day, And long the brightness of the West Will light us on our devious way; Sit then, awhile, here in this wood— So total is the solitude, We safely may delay.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Folds of scarlet drapery shut in my view to the right hand; to the left were the clear panes of glass, protecting, but not separating me from the drear November day. At intervals, while turning over the leaves in my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon. Afar, it offered a pale blank of mist and cloud; near, a scene of wet lawn and storm-beat shrub, with ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seemed as if my tongue pronounced words without my will consenting to their utterance: something spoke out of me over which I had no control.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am glad you are no relation of mine. I will never call you aunt as long as I live. I will never come to see you when I am grown up; and if any asks me how I liked you, and how you treated me, I will say the very thought of you makes me sick.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not violence that best overcomes hate — nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury. … Read the New Testament, and observe what Christ says, and how he acts — make his word your rule, and his conduct your example. … Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; do good to them that hate you and despitefully use you.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart... Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And then my mind made its first earnest effort to comprehend what had been infused into it concerning heaven and hell: and for the first it recoiled baffled; and for the first time glancing behind, on each side, and before it, it saw all round an unfathomed gulf: it felt the one point where it stood — the present; all the rest was formless cloud and vacant depth: and it shuddered at the thought of tottering, and plunging amid that chaos.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By dying young, I shall escape great sufferings. I had not qualities or talents to make my way very well in the world: I should have been continually at fault.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't think, sir, that you have a right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My bride is here... because my equal is here, and my likeness.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can but die... and I believe in God. Let me try and wait His will in silence.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I scorn your idea of love," I could not help saying, as I rose up and stood before him, leaning my back against the rock. "I scorn the counterfeit sentiment you offer; yes, St. John, and I scorn you when you offer it.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God did not give me my life to throw away.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Reader, I married him.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken. Do you anticipate sentiment, and poetry, and reverie? Do you expect passion, and stimulus, and melodrama? Calm your expectations; reduce them to a lowly standard. Something real, cool and solid lies before you; something unromantic as Monday morning, when all who have work wake with the consciousness that they must rise and betake themselves thereto.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) said by 1855 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source