“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 ... If at my convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
Jane Eyre
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Charlotte Brontë 83
English novelist and poet 1816–1855Related quotes

Reported in George Shelley Hughs, Ancient Civilizations (1896), p. 596.

Variant: There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees.

“I like the moment when I break a man's ego”

About the success of the crucial charge he led at Opequon, in a letter to Sardis Birchard (20 December 1864)
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)