Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) was an English novelist and poet. Her writings initially appeared under the male alias Currer Bell. Charlotte was one of a troika of Brontë sisters whose writings introduced some of the most captivating individuals in the history of the novel.
Charlotte, along with her sisters Emily Brontë and Anne Brontë, grew up in the genteel poverty in the desolate Yorkshire village of Haworth and had limited experience of the outside world. The early death of their mother and their two older sisters drove the remaining children into an intense and private intimacy. Each sister went on to transform great personal adversity into distinctive artistic visions of passionate, emotional engagement that few other authors can match.
Charlotte’s four novels, The Professor (1846,) Jane Eyre (1847,) Shirley (1849,) and Villette (1853,) are works of remarkable passion and imagination. Jane Eyre, her best-known novel, tells the story of a plain and impoverished orphan governess who falls in love with her troubled—and married—employer. Brontë portrayed the struggle of the individual to maintain personal integrity with a dramatic intensity entirely new to English fiction.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Charlotte Bronte
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.
—Charlotte Bronte
But life is a battle: may we all be enabled to fight it well.
—Charlotte Bronte
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
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Guilt
If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Friendship, Friends
Let your performance do the thinking.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Performance, Action, Thinking
You—poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are—I entreat to accept me as a husband.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Husbands, Marriage
There are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Custom
Reason sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms. The passions may rage furiously, like true heathens, as they are; and the desires may imagine all sorts of vain things: but judgment shall still have the last word in every argument, and the casting vote in every decision.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Reason
Life is so constructed that an event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Events, Realistic Expectations, Expectation, Expectations
Better to be without logic than without feeling.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Thinking, Logic
Look twice before you leap.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Caution
The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Heart
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Women
A memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure, an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Memory
As to the sufferers, whose sole inheritance was labour, and who had lost that inheritance – who could not get work, and consequently could not get wages, and consequently could not get bread – they were left to suffer on, perhaps inevitably left. It would not do to stop the progress of invention, to damage science by discouraging its improvements; the war could not be terminated; efficient relief could not be raised. There was no help then; so the unemployed underwent their destiny – ate the bread and drank the waters of affliction.
Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines which they believed took their bread from them; they hated the buildings which contained those machines; they hated the manufacturers who owned those buildings.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Poverty
Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy and zeal, and truth, he labors for his race; he clears their painful way to improvement; he hews down like a giant the prejudices of creed and caste that encumber it. He may be stern; he may be exacting; he may be ambitious yet; but his is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon. His is the exaction of the apostle, who speaks but for Christ, when he says, “Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.” His is the ambition of the high master-spirit, which aims to fill a place in the first rank of those who are redeemed from the earth—who stand without fault before the throne of God, who share the last mighty victories of the Lamb, who are called, and chosen, and faithful.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Evangelism
Certain accidents of the weather, for instance, were almost dreaded by me, because they woke the being I was always lulling, and stirred up a craving cry I could not satisfy.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Weather
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.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Respect
Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Feelings, Judgment, Attitude, Judging
Men judge us by the success of our efforts. God looks at the efforts themselves.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Judgement
It is 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.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Action
When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were—large, brilliant and black.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Children
But this I know; the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. If the result be attractive, the World will praise you, who little deserve praise; if it be repulsive, the same World will blame you, who almost as little deserve blame.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Prejudice, Education, Tolerance
I tell you I must go! Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you?. Do you think I am an automaton?.-a machine without feelings?. And can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips, and my drop of living water dashed from my cup?. Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless?. You think wrong!
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Freedom
A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Sleep
Indisputably a great, good, handsome man is the first of created things.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Man
Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrong.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Anger, Faith
Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy; its after-flavor, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Vengeance, Revenge
Memory in youth is active and easily impressible; in old age it is comparatively callous to new impressions, but still retains vividly those of earlier years.
—Charlotte Bronte
Topics: Youth
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Anne Bronte English Novelist, Poet
Emily Bronte English Novelist, Poet
Mary Elizabeth Braddon English Novelist
George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) English Novelist
Ouida (Maria Louise Rame) English Novelist
Charles Reade British Author
Frances Hodgson Burnett British Novelist, Playwright
Mary Shelley English Novelist
Elizabeth Gaskell English Novelist
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie English Novelist, Biographer