Charlotte Brontë

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.

Every joy that life gives must be earned ere it be secured; and how hardly earned, those only know who have wrestled for great prizes. The heart__ blood must gem with red beads the brow of the combatant, before the wreath of victory rustles over it.

Our power of being happy lies a good deal in ourselves, I believe.

The hopes that, in my own heart sown,And cherished by such sun and rain,As Joy and transient Sorrow shed,Have ripened to a harvest there:

As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to impart all that the brain conceives; though I daresay it would be silent on much the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible, it was never intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of solitude: it is a mouth which should speak much and smile often, and have human affection for its interlocutor.

Swifts, on a fine morning in May, flying this way, that way, sailing around at a great hight, perfectly happily. Then, one leaps onto the back of another, grasps tightly and forgetting to fly they both sink down and down, in a great dying fall, fathom after fathom, until the female utters a loud, piercing cry of ecstasy.

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

I have been wrongly accused; and you, ma'am, and everybody else, will now think me wicked.""We shall think you what you prove yourself to be, my child. Continue to act as a good girl, and you will satisfy us.

Besides, I seemed to hold two lives__he life of thought, and that of reality; and, provided the former was nourished with a sufficiency of the strange necromantic joys of fancy, the privileges of the latter might remain limited to daily bread, hourly work, and a roof of shelter.

I'll borrow of imagination what reality will not give me.

A lover finds his mistress asleep on a mossy bank; he wishes to catch a glimpse of her fair face without waking her. He steals softly over the grass, careful to make no sound; he pauses -- fancying she has stirred: he withdraws: not for worlds would he be seen. All is still: he again advances: he bends above her; a light veil rests on her features: he lifts it, bends lower; now his eyes anticipate the vision of beauty -- warm, and blooming, and lovely, in rest. How hurried was their first glance! But how they fix! How he starts! How he suddenly and vehemently clasps in both arms the form he dared not, a moment since, touch with his finger! How he calls aloud a name, and drops his burden, and gazes on it wildly! He thus grasps and cries, and gazes, because he no longer fears to waken by any sound he can utter -- by any movement he can make. He thought his love slept sweetly: he finds she is stone dead.I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin.

Oh, mention it! If I storm, you have the art of weeping.""Mr. Rochester, I must leave you.""For how long, Jane? For a few minutes, while you smooth your hair _ which is somewhat dishevelled; and bathe your face _ which looks feverish?""I must leave Adele and Thornfield. I must part with you for my whole life: I must begin a new existence among strange faces and strange scenes.""Of course: I told you you should. I pass over the madness about parting from me. You mean you must become a part of me. As to the new existence, it is all right: you shall yet be my wife: I am not married. You shall be Mrs. Rochester _ both virtually and nominally. I shall keep only to you so long as you and I live. You shall go to a place I have in the south of France: a whitewashed villa on the shores of the Mediterranean. There you shall live a happy, and guarded, and most innocent life. Never fear that I wish to lure you into error _ to make you my mistress. Why did you shake your head? Jane, you must be reasonable, or in truth I shall again become frantic."His voice and hand quivered: his large nostrils dilated; his eye blazed: still I dared to speak."Sir, your wife is living: that is a fact acknowledged this morning by yourself. If I lived with you as you desire, I should then be your mistress: to say otherwise is sophistical _ is false.""Jane, I am not a gentle-tempered man _ you forget that: I am not long-enduring; I am not cool and dispassionate. Out of pity to me and yourself, put your finger on my pulse, feel how it throbs, and _ beware!"He bared his wrist, and offered it to me: the blood was forsaking his cheek and lips, they were growing livid; I was distressed on all hands. To agitate him thus deeply, by a resistance he so abhorred, was cruel: to yield was out of the question. I did what human beings do instinctively when they are driven to utter extremity _ looked for aid to one higher than man: the words "God help me!" burst involuntarily from my lips."I am a fool!" cried Mr. Rochester suddenly. "I keep telling her I am not married, and do not explain to her why. I forget she knows nothing of the character of that woman, or of the circumstances attending my infernal union with her. Oh, I am certain Jane will agree with me in opinion, when she knows all that I know! Just put your hand in mine, Janet _ that I may have the evidence of touch as well as sight, to prove you are near me _ and I will in a few words show you the real state of the case. Can you listen to me?""Yes, sir; for hours if you will.

Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life.

I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitments, awaited those who had the courage to go forth into it's expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it's perils.

My world had for some years been Lowood: my experience had been of its rules and systems; now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.

We can burst the bonds which chain us,Which cold human hands have wrought,And where none shall dare restrain usWe can meet again, in thought.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.These things and deeds are diametrically opposed: they are as distinct as is vice from virtue. Men too often confound them: they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ. There is _ I repeat it _ a difference; and it is a good, and not a bad action to mark broadly and clearly the line of separation between them.

How all my brain was in tumult, and all my heart in insurrection! Yet in what darkness, what dense ignorance, was the mental battle fought!