50 Dramatic Charlotte Brontë Quotes: Unveiling the Passionate Pen of a Literary Pioneer

1. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will.”

2. “I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.”

3. “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”

4. “I am not an angel,’ I asserted; ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.”

5. “I am not an automaton. You cannot manipulate my heart as you do your money.”

6. “Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!”

7. “I am solitary and cannot impart my feelings easily. I am sure you are the same.”

8. “I am thirsty for revenge. I wanted to kill you tonight.”

9. “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

10. “I cannot make speeches, Emma… If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”

11. “I can be on guard against my enemies, but God deliver me from my friends!”
12. “I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss.”
13. “I have no kindred to interfere.”
14. “I have kept myself; and, I trust, shall keep myself again.”
15. “I have little left in myself—I must have you.”
16. “I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence.”
17. “I must be responsible for the eyes I choose to see the world through.”
18. “I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.”
19. “I wish you to pass your life in travelling through the world.”
20. “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.”
21. “If I were to marry you, you would kill me. You are killing me now.”
22. “If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.”
23. “If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life.”
24. “If you wish me to be silent, you must keep your word.”
25. “It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.”
26. “It is madness to expect discretion and refinement in a girl who has never, ever been taught restraint.”
27. “Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
28. “Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.”
29. “Look here! to gain some real affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest.”
30. “My bride is here… because my equal is here, and my likeness.”
31. “No sight so sad as that of a naughty child,” he began, “especially a naughty little girl.”
32. “Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth.”
33. “She was very showy, but she was not genuine: she had a fine person, many brilliant attainments, but her mind was poor, her heart barren by nature.”
34. “The human heart has hidden treasures, in secret kept, in silence sealed.”
35. “The rapture of repose: the long, sunny days and the quiet, untroubled nights; the peaceful heart; the unchained thought; the treasured volume; the lamp and the lute; the Gothic window looking down on the well-arranged garden.”
36. “The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter—often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter—in the eye.”
37. “The trouble is not that I am single and likely to stay single, but that I am lonely and likely to stay lonely.”
38. “There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.”
39. “There is no happiness like mine. I have been broken, and I have been loved.”
40. “To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.”
41. “We cannot take the world except as a whole—ignorant alike of its good or evil, its folly or its wisdom.”
42. “We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us.”
43. “We should have been friends, Emma.”
44. “Wherever you are is my home—my only home.”
45. “You are my sympathy—my better self—my good angel.”
46. “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.”
47. “You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”
48. “You know full well as I do the value of sisters’ affections: There is nothing like it in this world.”
49. “Your goodness—your self-sacrifice—your noble-mindedness—have made me hate you.”
50. “Your words are such as ought not to be used: violent, unfeminine, and untrue.”