Charlotte Bronte

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

“Consistency, madam, is the first of Christian duties.”

“Conventionality is not morality.”

“The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter - often an unconscious, but still a truthful interpreter - in the eye.”

“Men judge us by the success of our efforts. God looks at the efforts themselves.”

“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.”

“If you are cast in a different mould to the majority, it is no merit of yours: Nature did it.”

“There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”

“Let your performance do the thinking.”

“Cheerfulness, it would appear, is a matter which depends fully as much on the state of things within, as on the state of things without and around us.”

“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.”

“I try to avoid looking forward or backward, and try to keep looking upward.”

“You know full well as I do the value of sisters' affections: There is nothing like it in this world.”

“I feel monotony and death to be almost the same.”

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

“If I could I would always work in silence and obscurity, and let my efforts be known by their results.”

“Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.”

“Who has words at the right moment?”

“True enthusiasm is a fine feeling whose flash I admire where-ever I see it.”

“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.”