Jane Eyre Quotes


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Jane Eyre Quotes

  • Wikiquote: Jane Eyre
    • "Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last." -Preface, 2nd edition (21 December 1847)
    • "It is not violence that best overcomes hate — nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury" -Helen Burns to Jane (Ch. 6)
    • "What a singularly deep impression her injustice seems to have made on your heart... 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." -Helen Burns to Jane (Ch. 6)
    • "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 arrived, green and strong! He made me love him without looking at me." -Jane (Ch. 17)
    • "I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will..." -Jane to Mr. Rochester (Ch. 23)
    • "My bride is here... because my equal is here, and my likeness" -Mr. Rochester to Jane (Ch. 23)
    • "Reader, I married him." -Jane (Ch 38)


  • BookRags: Jane Eyre Quotes  WARNING: Paid subscription required after free preview
    • "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." -Jane, Chapter 12, pg. 96
    • "'You have saved my life: I have a please in owning you so immense a debt. I cannot say more. Nothing else that has being would have been tolerable to me in the character of creditor for such an obligation: but you: it is different;--I feel your benefits no burden, Jane...I knew,' he continued, '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...strike delight to my very inmost heart so for nothing...My cherished preserver, good night!'" -Mr. Rochester, Chapter 15, pg. 133
    • "'Sir,' I answered, 'a wanderer's repose or a sinner's reformation should never depend on a fellow-creature. Men and women die; philosophers falter in their wisdom, and Christians in goodness: if any one you know has suffered and erred, let him look higher than his equals for strength to amend, and solace to heal.'" -Jane, Chapter 20, pg. 192
    • "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 snapt; and then I've a nervous notion I should take to bleeding inwardly." -Mr. Rochester, Chapter 23, pg. 221


  • SparkNotes: Important Jane Eyre Quotes Explained
    • "Feeling . . . clamoured wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said. “. . . soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?” Still indomitable was the reply: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation . . . They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs.” -Jane, Chapter 27
    • "I have now been married ten years. 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. No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh. I know no weariness of my Edward’s society: he knows none of mine, any more than we each do of the pulsation of the heart that beats in our separate bosoms; consequently, we are ever together." -Jane, Chapter 38


  • LitQuotes: Jane Eyre Quotes
    • "It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."
    • "Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilised by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones."


    • "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" -Jane, (Chapter 27).


  • About.com: Jane Eyre Quotes  WARNING: Pop-ups
    • "If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends." -Helen Burns