All quotes

To be kind is worth a great deal to other people.

Yahweh, you have searched me, and you know me.

For you formed my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Search me, God, and know my heart. Try me, and know my thoughts.

Iron sharpens iron; so a man sharpens his friend’s countenance.

Like water reflects a face, so a man’s heart reflects the man.

Perfume and incense bring joy to the heart; so does earnest counsel from a man’s friend.

How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! he is his own exclusive object.

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.

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!

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.

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

In the face of a true friend a man sees as it were a second self.

If I am a princess in rags and tatters, I can be a princess inside. It would be easy to be a princess if I were dressed in cloth of gold, but it is a great deal more of a triumph to be one all the time when no one knows it.

Whats'ever 'appens to you--whats'ever--you'd be a princess all the same--an' nothin' couldn't make you nothin' different.

At the beginning I was only a little mass of possibilities. It was my teacher who unfolded and developed them.

In what concerns you much, do not think that you have companions: know that you are alone in the world.

Fatal is the discovery that our friend is fallible, that he has prejudices.

I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer

Less possessed of your confidence in advance than any of my predecessors, I am deeply conscious of the prospect that I shall stand more and oftener in need of your indulgence.

Running in this Road I found many like myself; and we associated in that which is the reverse of true Friendship.

While I silently ponder on that Change wrought in me, I find no Language equal to it, nor any Means to convey to another a clear Idea of it.

You are like a chestnut burr, prickly outside, but silky-soft within, and a sweet kernal, if one can only get at it. Love will make you show your heart one day, and then the rough burr will fall off.