The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

2 " Well! what is there remarkable in all this? Why have I recorded it? Because, reader, it was important enough to give me a cheerful evening, a night of pleasing dreams, and a morning of felicitous hopes. Shallow-brained cheerfulness, foolish dreams, unfounded hopes, you would say; and I will not venture to deny it: suspicions to that effect arose too frequently in my own mind. But our wishes are like tinder: the flint and steel of circumstances are continually striking out sparks, which vanish immediately, unless they chance to fall upon the tinder of our wishes; then, they instantly ignite, and the flame of hope is kindled in a moment. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

3 " I turn to another class [...] in whose eyes whatever is unusual is wrong: whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry--that parent of crime--an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth. I would suggest to such doubters certain obvious distinctions; I would remind them of certain simple truths.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

4 " She had her own opinions on every subject, and kept steadily to them--very tiresome opinions they often were; as she was always thinking of what was right and what was wrong, and had a strange reverence for matters connected with religion, and an unaccountable liking to good people. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

5 " The human heart is like india-rubber; a little swells it, but a great deal will not burst it. If "little more than nothing will disturb it, little less than all things will suffice" to break it. As in the outer members of our frame, there is a vital power inherent in itself that strengthens it against external violence. Every blow that shakes it will serve to harden it against a future stroke; as constant labour thickens the skin of the hand, and strengthens its muscles instead of wasting them away: so that a day of arduous toil, that might excoriate a lady's palm, would make no sensible impression on that of a hardy ploughman. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

6 " know so well that human nature is human nature everywhere, whether under tile or thatch, and that in every specimen of human nature that breathes, vice and virtue are ever found blended, in smaller or greater proportions, and that the proportion is not determined by station. I have seen villains who were rich, and I have seen villains who were poor, and I have seen villains who were neither rich nor poor, "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

7 " Habitual associates are known to exercise a great influence over each other's minds and manners. Those whose actions are for ever before our eyes, whose words are ever in our ears, will naturally lead us, albeit against our will, slowly, gradually, imperceptibly, perhaps, to act and speak as they do. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

8 " a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects; "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

9 " All true histories contain instruction; "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

10 " Is it that they think it a duty to be continually talking,' pursued she: 'and so never pause to think, but fill up with aimless trifles and vain repetitions when subjects of real interest fail to present themselves, or do they really take a pleasure in such discourse? "

― Emily Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

11 " I must, then, repeat continually that we are for ever sundered: — and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him. "

― Emily Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

12 " and then, instead of lamenting past calamities we might all cheerfully set to work to remedy them; and the greater the difficulties, the harder our present privations, the greater should be our cheerfulness to endure the latter, and our vigour to contend against the former. "

― Emily Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

13 " The road, which should have been white, was dark with a moving mass. The rioters were assembled in front of the closed yard gates, and a single figure stood within, apparently addressing them. The mill itself was perfectly black and still. There was neither life, light, nor motion around it. “Surely he is prepared. Surely that is not Moore meeting them alone?” whispered Shirley. “It is. We must go to him. I will go to him.” “That you will not.” “Why did I come, then? I came only for him. I shall join him. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

14 " I dare say he thinks he has outwitted me cleverly. And this is the way men deal with women — still concealing danger from them — thinking, I suppose, to spare them pain. They imagined we little knew where they were to-night. We know they little conjectured where we were. Men, I believe, fancy women’s minds something like those of children. Now, that is a mistake. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

15 " But not love! Love is real — the most real, the most lasting, the sweetest and yet the bitterest thing we know. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

16 " No man — no woman — is always strong, always able to bear up against the unjust opinion, the vilifying word. Calumny, even from the mouth of a fool, will sometimes cut into unguarded feelings. Shirley looked like a child that had been naughty and punished, but was now forgiven and at rest. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

17 " All men, taken singly, are more or less selfish; and taken in bodies, they are intensely so. The British merchant is no exception to this rule: the mercantile classes illustrate it strikingly. These classes certainly think too exclusively of making money; they are too oblivious of every national consideration but that of extending England’s — that is, their own — commerce. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

18 " Not one spark of spirit, not one symptom of resistance, would they have shown till the hand of the Corsican bandit had grasped that beloved purse; then, perhaps, transfigured at once into British bulldogs, they would have sprung at the robber’s throat, and there they would have fastened, and there hung, inveterate, insatiable, till the treasure had been restored. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

19 " For those who are not hungry, it is easy to palaver about the degradation of charity, and so on: but they forget the brevity of life, as well as its bitterness. We have none of us long to live. Let us help each other through seasons of want and woe as well as we can, without heeding in the least the scruples of vain philosophy. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras

20 " Their sisters have no earthly employment but household work and sewing, no earthly pleasure but an unprofitable visiting, and no hope, in all their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health. They are never well, and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness. The great wish, the sole aim of every one of them is to be married, but the majority will never marry; they will die as they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule; they don’t want them; they hold them very cheap. "

― Anne Brontë , The Bronte Sisters - The Complete Novels + Extras