All quotes

In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.

The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not, as we feel in a thousand instances.

There are darknesses in life, and there are lights; you are one of the lights.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be

My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood.

Come back, before I am grown into a very old man, so as you shall hardly know me.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will

To be together is for us to be at once as free as in solitude, as gay as in company.

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

This was wealth indeed!—wealth to the heart!—a mine of pure, genial affections.

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.

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!

Jane, I will be your brother—my sisters will be your sisters—without stipulating for this sacrifice of your just rights.

You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity.

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.

That any living woman should prefer it to home and husband, to love and motherhood, throws a fierce light on what women must have suffered for lack of freedom before.

Love is a terrible word, and I should blush to death if anything but a letter accused me on't.

One may be happy to a good degree, I think, in a faithful friend, a moderate fortune, and a retired life; further than this I know nothing to wish; but if there be anything beyond it, I wish it you.

It is not kind in you to desire an increase of my friendship; that is to doubt it is not as great already as it can be, than which you cannot do me a greater injury.

I shall never be persuaded that marriage has a charm to raise love out of nothing, much less out of dislike

a real kindness is so far beyond all compliment, that it never appears more than when there is least of t'other mingled with it

If you love me you will; and if you do not, I shall never love myself.

I find I want courage to marry where I do not like

How I should love that plain-heartedness you speak of, if you would use it; nothing is civil but that amongst friends.