Charlotte Brontë

I would always rather be happy than dignified.

[O]ur honeymoon will shine our life long: its beams will only fade over your grave or mine.

Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.

Dr. John, throughout his whole life, was a man of luck - a man of success. And why? Because he had the eye to see his opportunity, the heart to prompt to well-timed action, the nerve to consummate a perfect work. And no tyrant-passion dragged him back; no enthusiasms, no foibles encumbered his way.

I had not intended to love him; the reader knows I had wrought hard to extirpate from my soul the germs of love there detected; and now, at the first renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.

God surely did not create us, and cause us to live, with the sole end of wishing always to die. I believe, in my heart, we were intended to prize life and enjoy it, so long as we retain it. Existence never was originally meant to be that useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing it often becomes to many, and is becoming to me, among the rest.

Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.

Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion...Appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines that only tend to elate and magnify few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ.

And what is hell? Can you tell me that?___ pit full of fire.___nd should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?___o, sir.___hat must you do to avoid it?__ deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: __ must keep in good health, and not die.

My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world: almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for His creature: of whom I had made an idol.

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?

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

. . . nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are . . .

If for instance the sentiment possessing for the moment the empire of our mind is sorrow, will not the genius sharpen the sorrow and the sorrow purify the genius? Together, will they not be like a cut diamond for which language is only the wax on which they stamp their imprint? I believe that genius, thus awakened, has no need to seek out details, that it scarcely pauses to reflect, that it never thinks of unity: I believe that the details come naturally without search by the poet, that inspiration takes the place of reflection and as for unity, I think there is no unity so perfect as that which results from a heart filled with a single idea...The nature of genius is related to that of instinct; it's operation is both simple and marvelous.

You can write nothing of value unless you give yourself wholly to the the theme -- and when you so give yourself -- you lose appetite ans sleep -- it cannot be helped --

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.

I write because I cannot NOT write.