Best Brontë Quotes from Selected Works with Chapter Numbers

Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) was an English novelist and poet, the eldest of the three Brontë sisters who survived into adulthood and whose novels became classics of English literature. While her first novel, The Professor, was rejected by publishers, her second novel, Jane Eyre, was published in 1847. The sisters admitted to their Bell pseudonyms in 1848, and by the following year were celebrated in London literary circles. 

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was an English novelist and poet who is best known for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. She also published a book of poetry with her sisters Charlotte and Anne titled Poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell with her own poems finding regard as poetic genius. 

Below, find the best quotes from Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights with their corresponding chapter numbers! 

Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë

• Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. 
• Author's Preface

• 'No sight so sad as that of a naughty child,' he began, 'especially a naughty little girl. Do you know where the wicked go after death?' / 'They go to hell,' was my ready and orthodox answer. / 'And what is hell? Can you tell me that?' / 'A pit full of fire.' / 'And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?' / 'No, sir.' / 'What must you do to avoid it?' / I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: 'I must keep in good health and not die.' 
• Chapter 4

• I am not deceitful: if I were, I should say I loved you; but I declare I do not love you: I dislike you the worst of anybody in the world. 
• Chapter 4

• Even for me life had its gleams of sunshine. 
• Chapter 4

• It is far better to endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but yourself, than to commit a hasty action whose evil consequences will extend to all connected with you. 
• Chapter 6

• Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs. 
• Chapter 6

• 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. 
• Chapter 8

• Now I remembered that the real world was wide, and that a varied field of hopes and fears, of sensations and excitements, awaited those who had courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils. 
• Chapter 10

• It is a pity that doing one's best does not always answer. 
• Chapter 11

• I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes. 
• Chapter 12

• 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. . . . Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel . . . 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. 
• Chapter 12

• I don't think, sir, you have a right to command me merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience. 
• Chapter 14

• It does good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and, if discovered and responded to, must lead, ignis-fatuus-like, into miry wilds, whence there is no extrication. 
• Chapter 16

• 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 renewed view of him, they spontaneously revived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me. 
• Chapter 17

• 'He is not to them what he is to me,' I thought: 'he is not of their kind, I believe he is of mine;--I am sure he is,--I feel akin to him,--I understand the language of his countenance and movements; though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him.' 
• Chapter 17

• I must then repeat continually that we are forever sundered,--and yet, while I breathe and think I must love him'. 
• Chapter 17

• 'Good night, my--' He stopped, bit his lip, and abruptly left me. 
• Chapter 17

• I have told you, reader, that I had learnt to love Mr. Rochester; I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me.
• Chapter 18

• I can live alone, if self-respect and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure, born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld; or offered only at a priceI cannot afford to give up.
• Chapter 19

• There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.
• Chapter 22

• 'Because,' he said, 'I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you--especially when you are near me, as now: it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame. And if that boisterous channel, and two hundred miles or so of land came broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly. As for you--you'd forget me.'
• Chapter 23

• 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 any 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!--I have as much soul as you--and full as much heart! And if God had gifted me with some beauty and much wealth, I should have made it as hard for you to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you. I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh--it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!
• Chapter 23

• I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.
• Chapter 23

• I ask you to pass through life at my side--to be my second self, and best earthly companion.
• Chapter 23

• 'My bride is here,' he said, again drawing me to him, 'because my equal is here, and my likeness. Jane, will you marry me?'
• Chapter 23

• 'I am not an angel,' I asserted: 'and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me--for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.' 
• Chapter 24

• I loved him very much--more than I could trust myself to say--more than words had power to express. 
• Chapter 24

• She seemed the emblem of my past life; and he, I was now to array myself to meet, the dread, but adored, type of my unknown future day.
• Chapter 25

• Reader!--I forgave him at the moment, and on the spot.There was such deep remorse in his eye, such true pity in his tone, such manly energy in his manner; and besides, there was such unchanged love in his whole look and mien--I forgave him all: yet not in words, not outwardly; only at my heart's core. 
• Chapter 27

• Then you are mistaken, and you know nothing about me, and nothing about the sort of love of which I am capable. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still: if you raved, my arms should confine you, and not a strait waistcoat--your grasp, even in fury, would have a charm for me: if you flew at me as wildly as that woman did this morning, I should receive you in an embrace at least as fond as it would be restrictive. I should not shrink from you with disgust as I did from her: in your quiet moments you should have no watcher and no nurse but me; and I could hang over you with untiring tenderness, though you gave me no smile in return; and never weary of gazing into your eyes, though they had no longer a ray of recognition for me. 
• Chapter 27

• I have for the first time found what I can truly love--I have found you. You are my sympathy--my better self--my good angel--I am bound to you with strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you--and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one. 
• Chapter 27

• I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. 
• Chapter 27

• Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?
• Chapter 27

• The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter--often an unconscious, but still truthful interpreter--in the eye. 
• Chapter 27

• And it is your spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want: not alone your brittle frame.
• Chapter 27

• We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is in the unclouded night sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence.
• Chapter 28

• Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.
• Chapter 29

• I would always rather be happy than dignified. 
• Chapter 34

• Oh, that gentleness! how far more potent is it than force! 
• Chapter 35

• No--no--Jane: you must not go. No--I have touched you, heard you, felt the comfort of your presence--the sweetness of your consolation: I cannot give up these joys. I have little left in myself--I must have you. The world may laugh--may call me absurd, selfish--but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied: or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame. 
• Chapter 37

• 'Am I hideous, Jane?' / 'Very, sir: you always were, you know.' / 'Humph! The wickedness has not been taken out of you, wherever you have sojourned.' 
• Chapter 37

• But if you wish me to love you, could you but see how much I do love you, you would be proud and content. All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence for ever. 
• Chapter 37

• Reader, I married him. 
• Chapter 38

• I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest--blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am; ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. 
• Chapter 38

Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë

• "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." "More than girls?" "Very likely. 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." "Are you a wise person?" "I mean to try to be so. Go to sleep."
• Chapter 3

• I had a sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.
• Chapter 6

• 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 forever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?
• Chapter 6

• 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.
• Chapter 22

• 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 gold fruitage of Paradise.
• Chapter 22

• If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed.
• Chapter 26

• 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. 
• Chapter 29

• Silence is of different kinds and breathes different meanings. 
• Chapter 29

• 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. 
• Chapter 31

• His mind was indeed my library, and whenever it was opened to me, I entered bliss. 
• Chapter 33

• Life is so constructed that the event does not, cannot, will not match the expectation. 
• Chapter 34

• "But solitude is sadness." "Yes; it is sadness. Life, however, has worse than that. Deeper than melancholy lies heartbreak."
• Chapter 37

• To see and know the worst is to take from Fear her main advantage.
• Chapter 39

• 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 for whatever tended either to its culture or its destruction, I could not view impassibly. 
• Chapter 39

• I was full of faults: he took them and me all home.
• Chapter 41

• Lucy, take my love. One day share my life. Be my dearest, first on earth. 
• Chapter 41

• Once—unknown and unloved, I held him harsh and strange; the low stature, the wiry make, the angels, the darkness, the manner, displeased me. Now, penetrated with his influence, and living by his affection, having his worth by intellect, and his goodness by heart—I preferred him before all humanity. 
• Chapter 41

• I thought I loved him when he went away; I love him now in another degree; he is more my own.
• Chapter 42

• Peace, be still! Oh! a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice, but it was not uttered—not uttered till, when the hush came, some could not feel it: till, when the sun returned, his light was night to some! Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return. Let them picture union and a happy succeeding life.
• Chapter 42

Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë

• 'I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it, at last. I hope he will not die before I do!' / 'For shame, Heathcliff!' said I. 'It is for God to punish wicked people; we should learn to forgive.' / 'No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall.' 
• Chapter 7

• I love the ground under his feet, and the air over his head, and everything he touches, and every word he says--I love all his looks, and all his actions, and him entirely, and altogether. There now! 
• Chapter 9

• And so do I. I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. 
• Chapter 9

• It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire. 
• Chapter 9

• My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning; my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees--my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath--a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff--he's always, always in my mind--not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself--but, as my own being--so, don't talk of our separation again--it is impracticable; and-- 
• Chapter 9

• It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn.
• Chapter 10

• Oh, I'm burning! I wish I were out of doors--I wish I were a girl again, half savage, and hardy, and free; and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them!
• Chapter 11

• But Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I'll keep you. I'll not lie there by myself; they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won't rest till you are with me. I never will! 
• Chapter 11

• Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living. 
• Chapter 13

• If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. 
• Chapter 14

• Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken you heart--you have broken it--and in breaking it, you have broken mine.
• Chapter 15

• I love my murderer--but yours! How can I? 
• Chapter 15

• And I pray one prayer--I repeat it till my tongue stiffens--Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest, as long as I am living! You said I killed you--haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!
• Chapter 16

• 'He's not a human being,' she retorted; 'and he has no claim on my charity. I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me. People feel with their hearts, Ellen, and since he has destroyed mine, I have not power to feel for him, and I would not, though he groaned from this to his dying day, and wept tears of blood for Catherine! No, indeed, indeed, I wouldn't!'
• Chapter 17

• But treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends--they wound those who resort to them, worse than their enemies.
• Chapter 17

• And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!
• Chapter 17

• I despise him for himself, and hate him for the memories he revives!
• Chapter 20

• He wanted all to lie in an ecstasy of peace; I wanted to sparkle, and dance in a glorious jubilee. I said his heaven would be only half alive, and he said mine would be drunk; I said I should fall asleep in his, and he said he could not breathe in mine.
• Chapter 24

• Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises from your greater misery! You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you--nobody will cry for you, when you die! I wouldn't be you!
• Chapter 29

• In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least, for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree--filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women--in my own features--mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!
• Chapter 33

• I have to remind myself to breathe--almost to remind my heart to beat!
• Chapter 33

• I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
• Chapter 34