100+ Jane Eyre Quotes That Will Make You Believe In Love Again
Eyre was one of the first literary heroines to be recognized for her feminine strength, wit, and desire. She was a heroine ahead of her time, much like her creator, and her story is laced with nuggets of wisdom that are as relevant today as they were 169 years ago when the book was first published.
If you haven’t read Jane Eyre, the quotes below may persuade you to do so. And if you have, this will transport you to your high school English lit class. The point is, this Bronte novel is a classic, but if it’s not your cup of tea, we understand.
These quotes alone demonstrate the book’s beauty and charm. We’ve compiled a list of over 100 of the best Jane Eyre quotes for you to ponder on a dark and stormy night.
1. “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 rigout. If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
2. “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.” ― Charlotte Brontë , Jane Eyre
3. “Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
4. “Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still.”
5. “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”
6. “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 the courage to go forth into its expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.”
7. “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.”
8. “It is not violence that best overcomes hate nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.”
9. “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.”
10. “I must, then, repeat continually that we are forever sundered and yet, while I breathe and think, I must love him.”
11. “I could not unloved him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me.”
12. “I knew, you would do me good, in some way, at some time;- I saw it in your eyes when I first beheld you: their expression and smile did not- (again he stopped)- did not (he proceeded hastily) strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing. “
13. “No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.”
14. “It is a pity that doing one’s best does not always answer.”
15. “I loved him very much more than I could trust myself to say more than words had power to express.”
16. “And it is you, spirit – with will and energy, and virtue and purity that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.”
17. “I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.”
18. “I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful, happy accent.”
19. “Crying does not indicate that you are weak. Since birth, it has always been a sign that you are alive.”
20. “You, Jane, I must have you for my own, entirely my own.”
21. “We talk, I believe, all day long: to talk to each other is but more animated and an audible thinking. All my confidence is bestowed on him, all his confidence is devoted to me; we are precisely suited in character – perfect concord is the result.”
22. “I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.”
23. “I am paving hell with energy. I am laying down good intentions which I believe durable as flint.”
24. “I looked with timorous joy towards a stately house: I saw a blackened ruin.”
25. “A beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor penciled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance.”
26. “Mr. Rochester, if ever I did a good deed in my life – if ever I thought a good thought – if ever I prayed a sincere and blameless prayer – if ever I wished a righteous wish I am rewarded now. To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth.”
27. “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.”
28. “What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value-to press my lips to what I love-to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.”
29. “To prolong doubt was to prolong hope.”
30. “When you are inquisitive, Jane, you always make me smile. You open your eyes like an eager bird, and make every now and then a restless movement, as if answers in speech did not flow fast enough for you, and you wanted to read the tablet of one’s heart.”
31. “What necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer-the Future so much brighter?”
32. “You are no ruin sir – no lighting-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop.”
33. “Oh! that gentleness! how far more potent is it than force!”
34. “I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot of contamination must be an exquisite treasure-an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?”
35. “Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes.”
36. “Would you not be happier if you tried to forget her severity, together with the passionate emotions it excited? Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs.”
37. “The eagerness of a listener quickens the tongue of a narrator.”
38. “I sat down and tried to rest. I could not; though I had been on foot all day, I could not now repose an instant; I was too much excited. A phase of my life was closing tonight, a new one opening tomorrow: impossible to slumber in the interval; I must watch feverishly while the change was being accomplished.”
39. “It is always the way of events in this life,…no sooner have you got settled in a pleasant resting place, than a voice calls out to you to rise and move on, for the hour of repose is expired.”
40. “Dread remorse when you are tempted to err, Miss Eyre; remorse is the poison of life.”
41. “I was actually permitting myself to experience a sickening sense of disappointment: but rallying my wits, and recollecting my principles, I at once called my sensations to order; and it was wonderful how I got over the temporary blunder–how I cleared up the mistake of supposing Mr. Rochester’s movements a matter in which I had any cause to take vital interest.”
42. “You are cold, because you are alone: no contact strikes the fire from you that is in you. You are sick; because the best of feelings, the highest and the sweetest given to man, keeps far away from you. You are silly, because, suffer as you may, you will not beckon it to approach, nor will you stir one step to meet it where it waits you.”
43. “I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing.”
44. “A loving eye is all the charm needed: to such you are handsome enough; or rather, your sternness has a power beyond beauty.”
45. “Spring drew on…and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that Hope traversed them at night, and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.”
46. “Of yourself you could come with soft flight and nestle against my heart, if you would: seized against your will, you will elude the grasp like an essence you will vanish
47. “If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”
48. “I am not an angel, 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.”
48. “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 price I cannot afford to give.”
49. “Reader, I married him.”
50. “Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”
51. “Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”
52. “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, great and strong! He made me love him without looking at me.”
53. “Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice.”
54. “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 forever.”
55. “The soul, fortunately, has an interpreter often an unconscious but still a faithful interpreter in the eye.”
56. “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.”
57. “I ask you to pass through life at my side – to be my second self, and best earthly companion.”
58. “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
59. “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
60. “Do you think I am an automaton? a machine without feelings? and can bear to have my 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!”
61. “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unstained I am, the more I will respect myself.”
62. “Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or registering wrongs.”
63. “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 rigout … If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
64. “the horizon bounded by a propitious sky, azure, marbled with pearly white.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
65. “I stood lonely enough, but to that feeling of isolation I was accustomed: it did not oppress me much.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
66. “Little Jane’s love would have been my best reward, without it, my heart is broken.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
67. “I am not your dear; I cannot lie down: send me to school soon, Mrs. Reed, for I hate to live here.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
68. “Well had Solomon said, ‘Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
69. “This girl who stands so quiet and grave at the mouth of hell. This girl who is all quietness and sanity and innocence. You wondered why I wanted her?” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
70. “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.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
71. “I often think it would be such luxury to go mad, and not have to worry about anything. Others would have to worry for me, about me.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
72. “Reader, I married him. A quiet wedding we had: he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
73. “It is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
74. “For I too liked reading, thought of a frivolous and childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend the serious or substantial.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre“
75. “When his first-born was put into his arms, he could see that the boy had inherited his own eyes, as they once were – large, brilliant, and black.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
76. “Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scratcher’s can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.”
77. “Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.”
78. “Mr. Rochester had sometimes read my unspoken thoughts with an acumen to me incomprehensible: in the present instance he took no notice of my abrupt vocal response; but he smiled at me with a certain smile he had of his own, and which he used but on rare occasions.
He seemed to think too good for common purpose: it was the real sunshine of feeling-he shed it over me now.”
79. “You are no ruin sir – no lighting-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop.”
80. “You have rather the look of another world. I marveled where you had got that sort of face.”
81. “I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,–a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.”
82. “I soon forgot storm in music.”
83. “Self abandoned, relaxed and effortless, I seemed to have laid me down in the dried-up bed of a great river; I heard a flood loosened in remote mountains, I felt the torrent come; to rise I had no will, to flee I had no strength.”
84. “I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade the sweet charm of freshness would leave it. I did not then know that it was no transitory blossom, but rather the radiant resemblance of one, cut in an indestructible gem.”
85. “I think I must admit so fair a guest when it asks entrance to my heart.”
86. “Feeling without judgement is a washy draught indeed; but judgement untampered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.”
87. “You are human and fallible.”
88. “It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience.”
89. “Gentle, soft dream, nestling in my arms now, you will fly, too, as your sisters have all fled before you: but kiss me before you go – embrace me, Jane.”
90. “I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard… And what right would that ruin have to bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?”
91. “I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together.”
92. “You, sir, are the most phantom-like of all; you are a mere dream.”
93. “But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?”
94. “I would always rather be happy than dignified.”
95. “There is no happiness like that of being loved by your fellow-creatures, and feeling that your presence is an addition to their comfort.”
96. “’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.’”
95. “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.” – Mr. Rochester
96. “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 come broad between us, I am afraid that cord of communion will be snap; and then I’ve a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly.” –Mr. Rochester
97. “I am not an angel,” I asserted; “and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
98. “You strange you almost unearthly thing! I love as my own flesh. You poor and obscure, and small and plain as you are I entreat to accept me as a husband.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
99. “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 the courage to go forth into it’s expanse, to seek real knowledge of life amidst it’s perils.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
100. “Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
101. “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
102. “Conventionality is not morality.” ― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
103. “Her coming was my hope each day, Her parting was my pain; The chance that did her steps delay Was ice in every vein.” ― Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
104. “I have a strange feeling with regard to you. As if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly knotted to a similar string in you.
And if you were to leave I’m afraid that cord of communion would snap. And I have a notion that I’d take to bleeding inwardly. As for you, you’d forget me.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
105. “Am I hideous, Jane? Very, sir: you always were, you know.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
106. “It is in 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.” ― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
The title character is a 10-year-old orphan living with her uncle’s family when the novel begins; her parents died of typhus. Jane is shunned by everyone except the nursemaid.
Later, she is sent to the austere Lowood Institution, a charity school, where she and the other girls are mistreated; “Lowood,” as the name implies, is the “low” point in Jane’s young life. However, in the face of such adversity, she gathers strength and confidence.
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