59 quotes
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
Jane Eyre (1847)
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.
Jane Eyre (1847)
Novelists should never allow themselves to weary of the study of real life.
The Professor (1857)
There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.
Villette (1853)
If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.
Better to be without logic than without feeling.
The Professor (1857)
The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
Jane Eyre (1847)
I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be happy than dignified.
Jane Eyre (1847)
Liberty lends us her wings and Hope guides us by her star.
Villette (1853)
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Jane Eyre (1847)
Unlawful pleasure, trenching on another’s rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure—its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave forever.
The Professor (1857)
I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.
Jane Eyre (1847)
It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.
Jane Eyre (1847)
School-rules, school-duties, school-habits and notions, and voices, and faces, and phrases, and costumes, and preferences, and antipathies — such was what I knew of existence.
Jane Eyre (1847)
If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.
Carolyn Warner (1992)
The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted.
Jane Eyre (1847)
What animal magnetism drew thee and me together—I know not.
The Professor (1857)
It is not violence that best overcomes hate — nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.
Jane Eyre (1847)
I avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.
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.
Shirley (1849)