“I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“Life is so constructed, that the event does not, cannot, will not, match the expectation.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“His mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“Do you like him much?'
I told you I liked him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much: he is full of faults.'
Is he?'
All boys are.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“But solitude is sadness.'
'Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy lies heart-break.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“Silence is of different kinds, and breathes different meanings.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“Wise people say it is folly to think anybody perfect; and as to likes and dislikes, we should be friendly to all, and worship none”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“The negation of severe suffering was the nearest approach to happiness I expected to know. Besides, I seemed to hold two lives - the life of thought, and that of reality.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“To see and know the worst is to take from Fear her main advantage.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“While I loved, and while I was loved, what an existence I enjoyed!”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“Lucy, take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“If there are words and wrongs like knives, whose deep inflicted lacerations never heal - cutting injuries and insults of serrated and poison-dripping edge - so, too, there are consolations of tone too fine for the ear not fondly and for ever to retain their echo: caressing kindnesses - loved, lingered over through a whole life, recalled with unfaded tenderness, and answering the call with undimmed shine, out of that raven cloud foreshadowing Death himself.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“The love, born of beauty was not mine; I had nothing in common with it: I could not dare to meddle with it, but another love, venturing diffidently into life after long acquaintance, furnace-tried by pain, stamped by constancy, consolidated by affection’s pure and durable alloy, submitted by intellect to intellect’s own tests, and finally wrought up, by his own process, to his own unflawed completeness, this Love that laughed at Passion, his fast frenzies and his hot and hurried extinction, in this Love I had a vested interest; and whatever tended either to its culture or its destruction, I could not view impassibly.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“I believe that creature is a changeling: she is a perfect cabinet of oddities.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“~Do you like him much?
~I told you I like him a little. Where is the use of caring for him so very much? He is full of faults.
~Is he?
~All boys are.
~More than girls?
~Very likely. Wise people say it is folly to think anyboy perfect, and as to likes and diskiles, we should be friendly to all, and worship none.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“We should acknowledge God merciful, but not always for us comprehensible.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“Rapidly, merrily,
Life's sunny hours flit by,
Gratefully, cheerily
Enjoy them as they fly!”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“I would not be you for a kingdom.'
The remark was too naïve to rouse anger; I merely said -
'Very good.'
'And what would you give to be ME?' she inquired.
'Not a bad sixpence - strange as it may sound', I replied. 'You are but a poor creature.'
'You don't think so in your heart.'
'No; for in my heart you have not the outline of a place: I only occasionally turn you over in my brain.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“I doubt if I have made the best use of all my calamities. Soft, amiable natures they would have refined to saintliness; of strong, evil spirits they would have made demons; as for me, I have only been a woe-struck and selfish woman.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and for ever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“I believe in that goodly mansion, his heart, he kept one little place under the skylights where Lucy might have entertainment, if she chose to call. It was not so handsome as the chambers where he lodged his male friends; it was not like the hall where he accommodated his philanthropy, or the library where he treasured his science, still less did it resemble the pavilion where his marriage feast was splendidly spread; yet, gradually, by long and equal kindness, he proved to me that he kept one little closet, over the door of which was written " Lucy's Room." I kept a place for him, too—a place of which I never took the measure, either by rule or compass: I think it was like the tent of Peri-Banou. All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand—yet, released from that hold and constriction, I know not but its innate capacity for expanse might have magnified it into a tabernacle for a host.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“But afterwards, is there nothing more for me in life - no true home - nothing to be dearer to me than myself?”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shadows of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature - shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity - but slow degrees I became a frequenter of this straight narrow path.”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
“Great pains were taken to hide chains with flowers”
― Charlotte Brontë, quote from Villette
Charlotte Brontë
Born place: in Thornton, Yorkshire, England, The United Kingdom
Born date April 21, 1816
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“Everyone will have gone then except us, because we're tied to this soil by a roomful of trunks where the household goods and clothing of grandparents are kept, and the canopies that my parenrs' horses used when they came to Macondo, fleeing from the war. We've been sown into this soil by the memory of the remote dead whose bones can no longer be found twenty fathoms under the earth. The trunks have been in the room ever since the last days of the war; and they'll be there this afternoon when we come back from the burial, if that final wind hasn't passed, the one that will sweep away Macondo, its bedrooms full of lizards and its silent people devastated by memories.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, quote from Leaf Storm and Other Stories
“Mother—” began Ramona, leaning out into the hall. Mother paid no attention to her. “I just don’t see what we can”
― Beverly Cleary, quote from Beezus and Ramona
“I am a forest fire and an ocean, and I will burn you just as much
as I will drown everything you have inside.”
― Shinji Moon, quote from The Anatomy of Being
“No one had made me feel this way, and no one ever would.”
― Meredith Wild, quote from Hardpressed
“12. To these belong his statement that there will be a period of some thousand years after the resurrection of the dead, and that the kingdom of Christ will be set up in material form on this very earth. I suppose he got these ideas through a misunderstanding of the apostolic accounts, not perceiving that the things said by them were spoken mystically in figures. 13. For he appears to have been of very limited understanding, as one can see from his discourses. But it was due to him that so many of the Church Fathers after him adopted a like opinion, urging in their own support the antiquity of the man; as for instance Irenæus and any one else that may have proclaimed similar views.”
― Paul L. Maier, quote from Eusebius: The Church History
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