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I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.

— Charlotte Brontë Shirley (1849)

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More quotes by Charlotte Brontë

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.

All Charlotte Brontë quotes →

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Francis Bacon Meditationes sacræ (1597)

It is not in the books of the Philosophers, but in the religious symbolism of the Ancients, that we must look for the footprints of Science, and re-discover the Mysteries of Knowledge.

Albert Pike Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871)

There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Logan Pearsall Smith Afterthoughts (1931)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Charlotte Brontë (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.