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Charlotte Brontë citations
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Charlotte Brontë , née le 21 avril 1816 à Thornton et morte le 31 mars 1855 à Haworth , est une romancière anglaise.

Troisième fille du révérend Patrick Brontë, au sein d'une famille de condition modeste qui compte six enfants, elle bénéficie, comme ses quatre sœurs et son frère, de la présence d'un père qui a poussé ses études classiques jusqu'à l'Université de Cambridge, et n'hésite pas à leur transmettre sa culture et sa vision du monde.

Elle connaît cependant très tôt, alors qu'elle est encore tout enfant, le deuil de sa mère, puis de ses deux sœurs aînées, frappées par la tuberculose.

Malgré sa condition de femme et son absence de moyens financiers, elle réussit à publier ses poèmes et ceux de ses sœurs , en 1846, et surtout, à publier Jane Eyre, qui rencontre un succès considérable.

Elle est considérée aujourd'hui comme l'une des romancières de langue anglaise les plus accomplies.

✵ 21. avril 1816 – 31. mars 1855
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Charlotte Brontë Citations

“Je me dois à moi-même; plus je suis isolée, moins j’ai d’amis et de soutiens, plus je dois me respecter.”

Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre, 1847

soutien

“Ce n’est pas la violence qui dompte la haine, ni la vengeance qui guérit l’injure.”

Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre, 1847

vengeance , haine

Charlotte Brontë: Citations en anglais

“I envy your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot or contamination must be an exquisite treasure — an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Mr. Rochester to Jane (Ch. 14)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“I have twice seen Macready act; once in Macbeth and once in Othello. I astounded a dinner-party by honestly saying I did not like him. It is the fashion to rave about his splendid acting; anything more false and artificial, less genuinely impressive than his whole style, I could scarcely have imagined. The fact is, the stage-system altogether is hollow nonsense. They act farces well enough; the actors comprehend their parts and do them justice. They comprehend nothing about tragedy or Shakespeare, and it is a failure. I said so, and by so saying produced a blank silence, a mute consternation.”

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Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë, on William Macready. Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle, (by Clement King Shorter) (1896)

“I can so clearly distinguish between the criminal and his crime; I can so sincerely forgive the first while I abhor the last.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Helen Burns to Jane (Ch. 6)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“There is, in lovers, a certain infatuation of egotism; they will have a witness of their happiness, cost that witness what it may.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Chapter XXXVII: Sunshine

“The theatre was full — crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there; palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged and so hushed. Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising.She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos — hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing — half lava, half glow.I had heard this woman termed "plain," and I expected bony harshness and grimness — something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.For awhile — a long while — I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength — for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public — a milder condiment for a people's palate — than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised.Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest crimson threw her out, white like alabaster — like silver: rather, be it said, like Death.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Ch. XXIII: Vashi

“What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane to Helen Burns (Ch. 8)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“All these relics gave… Thornfield Hall the aspect of a home of the past: a shrine to memory. I liked the hush, the gloom, the quaintness of these retreats in the day; but I by no means coveted a night's repose on one of those wide and heavy beds: shut in, some of them, with doors of oak; shaded, others, with wrought old-English hangings crusted with thick work, portraying effigies of strange flowers, and stranger birds, and strangest human beings, — all which would have looked strange, indeed, by the pallid gleam of moonlight.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 11)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“My God, whose son, as on this night, took on Him the form of man, and for man vouchsafed to suffer and bleed, controls thy hand, and without His behest, thou canst not strike a stroke. My God is sinless, eternal, all-wise, and in Him is my trust, and though stripped and crushed by thee, -though naked, desolate, void of resource- I do not despair:where the lance of Guthrum now wet with my blood, I should not despair. I watch, I toil, I hope, I pray: Jehovah, in His own time, will aid.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre The Professor

Source: The Professor (1857), Ch. XVI

“I shall be called discontented. I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 12)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“Unlawful pleasure, trenching on another’s rights, is delusive and envenomed pleasure—its hollowness disappoints at the time, its poison cruelly tortures afterwards, its effects deprave forever.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre The Professor

Source: The Professor (1857), Ch. XX

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

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Charlotte Brontë

This quote is sometimes pointing Brontë as the author, but is is originally attributed to Richard Whately, first quoted in The Railroad Telegrapher, Volume 18 (1901), Order of Railroad Telegraphers, page 713.
Disputed

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 1) [opening line]
Jane Eyre (1847)

“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 27)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“What animal magnetism drew thee and me together—I know not.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre The Professor

Source: The Professor (1857), Ch. I

“Against slavery all right thinkers revolt, and though torture be the price of resistance, torture must be dared: though the only road to freedom lie through the gates of death, those gates must be passed; for freedom is indispensable.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre The Professor

Source: The Professor (1857), Ch. XXV

“It is a very strange sensation to inexperienced youth to feel itself quite alone in the world, cut adrift from every connection, uncertain whether the port to which it is bound can be reached, and prevented by many impediments from returning to that it has quitted.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 11)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“Old maids like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and the rich.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Shirley

Source: Shirley (1849), Ch. 22: Two Lives

“Yesterday I saw Mr. Thackeray. He dined here with some other gentlemen. He is a very tall man — above six feet high, with a peculiar face — not handsome, very ugly indeed, generally somewhat stern and satirical in expression, but capable also of a kind look. He was not told who I was, he was not introduced to me, but I soon saw him looking at me through his spectacles; and when we all rose to go down to dinner he just stepped quietly up and said “Shake hands”; so I shook hands. He spoke very few words to me, but when he went away he shook hands again in a very kind way. It is better, I should think, to have him for a friend than an enemy, for he is a most formidable-looking personage. I listened to him as he conversed with the other gentlemen. All he says is most simple, but often cynical, harsh, and contradictory.”

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Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë, on William Makepeace Thackeray. Charlotte Brontë and Her Circle, (by Clement King Shorter) (1896)

“I told him how we kept fewer forms between us and God; retaining, indeed, no more than, perhaps, the nature of mankind in the mass rendered necessary for due observance. I told him I could not look on flowers and tinsel, on wax- lights and embroidery, at such times and under such circumstances as should be devoted to lifting the secret vision to Him whose home is Infinity, and His being — Eternity. That when I thought of sin and sorrow, of earthly corruption, mortal depravity, weighty temporal woe — I could not care for chanting priests or mumming officials; that when the pains of existence and the terrors of dissolution pressed before me — when the mighty hope and measureless doubt of the future arose in view — _then_, even the scientific strain, or the prayer in a language learned and dead, harassed: with hindrance a heart which only longed to cry — "God be merciful to me, a sinner!"”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Chapter XXXVI: The Apple of Discord

“I recalled the voice I had heard; again I questioned whence it came, as vainly as before: it seemed in me — not in the external world. I asked, was it a mere nervous impression — a delusion? I could not conceive or believe: it was more like an inspiration.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 36)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“I have not much pride under such circumstances: I would always rather be happy than dignified.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Source: Jane Eyre (1847), Ch. 34

“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.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane to Mr. Rochester (Ch. 23)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“I scorn your idea of love," I could not help saying, as I rose up and stood before him, leaning my back against the rock. "I scorn the counterfeit sentiment you offer; yes, St. John, and I scorn you when you offer it.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane to St. John Rivers (Ch. 34)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“I can but die… and I believe in God. Let me try and wait His will in silence.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 28)
Jane Eyre (1847)

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

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Charlotte Brontë

Carolyn Warner (1992), page 135

““My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary;
Long is the way, and the mountains are wild;
Soon will the twilight close moonless and dreary
Over the path of the poor orphan child.Why did they send me so far and so lonely,
Up where the moors spread and grey rocks are piled?
Men are hard-hearted, and kind angels only
Watch o’er the steps of a poor orphan child.Yet distant and soft the night breeze is blowing,
Clouds there are none, and clear stars beam mild,
God, in His mercy, protection is showing,
Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child.Ev’n should I fall o’er the broken bridge passing,
Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled,
Still will my Father, with promise and blessing,
Take to His bosom the poor orphan child.There is a thought that for strength should avail me,
Though both of shelter and kindred despoiled;
Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me;
God is a friend to the poor orphan child.””

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Bessie's song (Ch. 3)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“My bride is here… because my equal is here, and my likeness.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Mr. Rochester to Jane (Ch. 23)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“Yesterday I went for the second time to the Crystal Palace. We remained in it about three hours, and I must say I was more struck with it on this occasion than at my first visit. It is a wonderful place – vast, strange, new and impossible to describe. Its grandeur does not consist in one thing, but in the unique assemblage of all things. Whatever human industry has created you find there, from the great compartments filled with railway engines and boilers, with mill machinery in full work, with splendid carriages of all kinds, with harness of every description, to the glass-covered and velvet-spread stands loaded with the most gorgeous work of the goldsmith and silversmith, and the carefully guarded caskets full of real diamonds and pearls worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. It may be called a bazaar or a fair, but it is such a bazaar or fair as Eastern genii might have created. It seems as if only magic could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth – as if none but supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours and marvellous power of effect. The multitude filling the great aisles seems ruled and subdued by some invisible influence. Amongst the thirty thousand souls that peopled it the day I was there not one loud noise was to be heard, not one irregular movement seen; the living tide rolls on quietly, with a deep hum like the sea heard from the distance.”

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Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë, on attending The Great Exhibition of 1851. The Brontes' Life and Letters, (by Clement King Shorter) (1907)

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. 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.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 12)
Jane Eyre (1847)

“Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt? May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agonized as in that hour left my lips; for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love.”

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Charlotte Brontë livre Jane Eyre

Jane (Ch. 27)
Jane Eyre (1847)

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