Top 200 Charlotte Brontë Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “No mockery in the world ever sounds to me as hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.”

— Charlotte Brontë

152. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

— Charlotte Brontë

153. “I mean that I value vision, and dread being struck stone blind.”

— Charlotte Brontë

154. “He turned away; he threw himself on his face on the sofa. ‘Oh, Jane! my hope – my love – my life!’ broke in anguish from his lips.”

— Charlotte Brontë

155. “The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives – the life of thought, and that of reality.”

— Charlotte Brontë

156. “Gentle, soft dream, nestling in my arms now, you will fly, too, as your sisters have all fled before you: but kiss me before you go – embrace me, Jane.”

— Charlotte Brontë

157. “My love has placed her little hand With noble faith in mine, And vowed that wedlock’s sacred band Our nature shall entwine. My love has sworn, with sealing kiss, With me to live – to die; I have at last my nameless bliss: As I love – loved am I!”

— Charlotte Brontë

158. “Oh madam, when you put bread and cheese, instead of burnt porridge, into these children’s mouths, you may indeed feed their vile bodies, but you little think how you starve their immortal souls!”

— Charlotte Brontë

159. “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.”

— Charlotte Brontë

160. “If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.”

— Charlotte Brontë

161. “You have rather the look of another world. I marvelled where you had got that sort of face.”

— Charlotte Brontë

162. “Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.”

— Charlotte Brontë

163. “He was the first to recognise me, and to love what he saw.”

— Charlotte Brontë

164. “You ask rather too many questions. I have given you answers enough for the present: now I want to read.”

— Charlotte Brontë

165. “Great pains were taken to hide chains with flowers.”

— Charlotte Brontë

166. “For I too liked reading, thought of a frivolous and childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend the serious or substantial.”

— Charlotte Brontë

167. “I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman.”

— Charlotte Brontë

168. “God waits only the separation of spirit from flesh to crown us with a full reward. Why, then, should we ever sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over, and death is so certain an entrance to happiness – to glory?”

— Charlotte Brontë

169. “In sunshine, in prosperity, the flowers are very well; but how many wet days are there in life – November seasons of disaster, when a man’s hearth and home would be cold indeed, without the clear, cheering gleam of intellect.”

— Charlotte Brontë

170. “My rest might have been blissful enough, only a sad heart broke it.”

— Charlotte Brontë

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

— Charlotte Brontë

172. “Rochester: I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me.”

— Charlotte Brontë

173. “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

174. “It did not seem as if a prop were withdrawn, but rather as if a motive were gone: it was not the power to be tranquil which had failed me, but the reason for tranquility was no more.”

— Charlotte Brontë

175. “I thank my Maker, that in the midst of judgment he has remembered mercy. I humbly entreat my Redeemer to give me strength to lead henceforth a purer life than I have done hitherto.”

— Charlotte Brontë

176. “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.”

— Charlotte Brontë

177. “No severe or prolonged bodily illness followed this incident of the red-room: it only gave my nerves a shock, of which I feel the reverberation to this day.”

— Charlotte Brontë

178. “I like rudeness a great deal better than flattery.”

— Charlotte Brontë

179. “You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person’s strength.”

— Charlotte Brontë

180. “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 Brontë

181. “I only want an easy mind, sir; not crushed by crowded obligations.”

— Charlotte Brontë

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

— Charlotte Brontë

183. “But afterwards, is there nothing more for me in life – no true home – nothing to be dearer to me than myself?”

— Charlotte Brontë

184. “The cool peace and dewy sweetness of the night filled me with a mood of hope: not hope on any definite point, but a general sense of encouragement and heart-ease.”

— Charlotte Brontë

185. “The City seems so much more in earnest: its business, its rush, its roar are such serious things, sights and sounds. The City is getting its living – the West-End but enjoying its pleasure.”

— Charlotte Brontë

186. “What delusion has come over me? What sweet madness has seized me?”

— Charlotte Brontë

187. “I seem to have gathered up a stray lamb in my arms: you wandered out of the fold to seek your shepherd, did you, Jane?”

— Charlotte Brontë

188. “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 Brontë

189. “We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.”

— Charlotte Brontë

190. “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.”

— Charlotte Brontë

191. “To talk to each other is but a more animated and an audible thinking.”

— Charlotte Brontë

192. “Presentiments are strange things: and so are sympathies; and so are signs; and the three combined make one mystery to which humanity had not yet found the key.”

— Charlotte Brontë

193. “And with that answer, he left me. I would much rather he had knocked me down.”

— Charlotte Brontë

194. “That to begin with; let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure.”

— Charlotte Brontë

195. “We should acknowledge God merciful, but not always for us comprehensible.”

— Charlotte Brontë

196. “Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength.”

— Charlotte Brontë

197. “I think you will learn to be natural with me, as I find it impossible to be conventional with you.”

— Charlotte Brontë

198. “They will both be happy, and I do not grudge them their bliss; but I groan under my own misery: some of my suffering is very acute. Truly, I ought not to have been born: they should have smothered me at first cry.”

— Charlotte Brontë

199. “Good fortune opens the hand as well as the heart wonderfully; and to give somewhat when we have largely received, but to afford a vent to the unusual ebullition of the sensations.”

— Charlotte Brontë

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

— Charlotte Brontë