Top 200 Charlotte Brontë Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties.”

— Charlotte Brontë

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

— Charlotte Brontë

203. “Whatever my powers – feminine or the contrary – God had given them, and I felt resolute to be ashamed of no faculty of his bestowal.”

— Charlotte Brontë

204. “I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.”

— Charlotte Brontë

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

— Charlotte Brontë

206. “You – you strange – you almost unearthly thing! – I love as my own flesh. You – poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are – I entreat to accept me as a husband.”

— Charlotte Brontë

207. “Adversity is a good school.”

— Charlotte Brontë

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

— Charlotte Brontë

209. “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

210. “Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning.”

— Charlotte Brontë

211. “Reserved people often really need the frank discussion of their sentiments and griefs more than the expansive.”

— Charlotte Brontë

212. “While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I enjoyed!”

— Charlotte Brontë

213. “I think I must admit so fair a guest when it asks entrance to my heart.”

— Charlotte Brontë

214. “You, Jane, I must have you for my own – entirely my own.”

— Charlotte Brontë

215. “If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and fine days will seem!”

— Charlotte Brontë

216. “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

217. “I both wished and feared to see Mr. Rochester on the day which followed this sleepless night. I wanted to hear his voice again, yet feared to meet his eye.”

— Charlotte Brontë

218. “I had a theoretical reverence and homage for beauty, elegance, gallantry, fascination but had I met those qualities incarnate in masculine shape, I should have known instinctively that they had nor could have sympathy with anything in me...”

— Charlotte Brontë

219. “Reader, I literally married him.”

— Charlotte Brontë

220. “Monsieur, sit down; listen to me. I am not a heathen, I am not hard-hearted, I am not unchristian, I am not dangerous, as they tell you; I would not trouble your faith; you believe in God and Christ and the Bible, and so do I.”

— Charlotte Brontë

221. “Is there not a terrible hollowness, mockery, want, craving, in that existence which is given away to others, for want of something of your own to bestow it on?”

— Charlotte Brontë

222. “Little Jane’s love would have been my best reward, without it, my heart is broken.”

— Charlotte Brontë

223. “It is good to be attracted out of ourselves, to be forced to take a near view of the sufferings, the privations, the efforts, the difficulties of others.”

— Charlotte Brontë

224. “The man of regular life and rational mind never despairs.”

— Charlotte Brontë

225. “There is nothing I fear so much as idleness, the want of occupation, inactivity, the lethargy of the faculties; when the body is idle, the spirit suffers painfully.”

— Charlotte Brontë

226. “I am always easy of belief when the creed pleases me.”

— Charlotte Brontë

227. “Fortune is proverbially called changeful, yet her caprice often takes the form of repeating again and again a similar stroke of luck in the same quarter.”

— Charlotte Brontë

228. “I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman.”

— Charlotte Brontë

229. “Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before ‘the writing on the wall’ and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.”

— Charlotte Brontë

230. “Say whatever your memory suggests is true; but add nothing and exaggerate nothing.”

— Charlotte Brontë

231. “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 Brontë

232. “Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words.”

— Charlotte Brontë

233. “Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.”

— Charlotte Brontë

234. “True enthusiasm is a fine feeling whose flash I admire where-ever I see it.”

— Charlotte Brontë

235. “Tact, if it be genuine, never sleeps.”

— Charlotte Brontë

236. “Your station is in my heart, and on the necks of those who would insult you.”

— Charlotte Brontë

237. “Nervous alarms should always be communicated, that they may be dissipated.”

— Charlotte Brontë

238. “Writers cannot choose their own mood: with them it is not always hide-tide, nor – thank Heaven! – always Storm.”

— Charlotte Brontë

239. “Propensities and principles must be reconciled by some means.”

— Charlotte Brontë

240. “When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were – large, brilliant, and black.”

— Charlotte Brontë

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

— Charlotte Brontë

242. “I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance what I have always said in theory Wait God’s will.”

— Charlotte Brontë

243. “There are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned.”

— Charlotte Brontë

244. “Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.”

— Charlotte Brontë

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

— Charlotte Brontë