"If we would build on a sure foundation in friendship, we must love friends for their sake rather than for our own.

And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.
~ Charlotte Brontë ~












More Charlotte Brontë quotes
"I believe - I daily find it proved - that we can get nothing in this world worth keeping, not so much as a principle or a conviction, except out of pu...
"I knew you would do me good in some way, at some time--I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you.
"But when one does not complain, and when one wants to master oneself with a tyrant’s grip — one’s faculties rise in revolt — and one pays for outward ...
"Those who live in retirement, whose lives have fallen amid the seclusion of schools or of other walled-in and guarded dwellings, are liable to be sudd...
"It is true I little respect women or girls who are loquacious either in boasting the triumphs, or bemoaning the mortifications, of feelings.
"One suffers in silence so long as one has the strength and when that strength fails one speaks without measuring one's words much.
"Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still
"Why can she not influence him more, when she is privileged to drawso near to him?” I asked myself. “Surely she cannot truly like him, or notlike him w...
"Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! - I have as much soul as you, - and full as ...
"At that time, I well remember whatever could excite - certain accidents of the weather, for instance, were almost dreaded by me, because they woke the...
"Where my soul went during that swoon I cannot tell. Whatever she saw, or wherever she travelled in her trance on that strange night she kept her own s...
"He turned away; he threw himself on his face on the sofa. 'Oh, Jane! my hope - my love - my life!' broke in anguish from his lips.
"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 ...
"Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.