Anne Brontë

To wheedle and coax is safer than to command.

However little you may esteem them as individuals, it is not pleasant to be looked upon as a liar and a hypocrite, to be thought to practice what you abhor, and to encourage the vices you would discountenance, to find your good intentions frustrated, and your hands crippled by your supposed unworthiness, and to bring disgrace on the principles you profess.

There is always a 'but' in this imperfect world.

A hardness such as this is taught by rough experience and despair alone.

It is natural for our unamiable sex to dislike the creatures, for you ladies lavish so many caresses upon them.

I will not allow myself to be worse than my fellows.

My God! O let me call Thee mine! Weak, wretched sinner though I be, My trembling soul would fain be Thine, My feeble faith still clings to Thee.

The brightest attractions to the lover too often prove the husband's greatest torments

I perceive the backs of young ladies' drawings, like the postscripts of their letters, are the most important and interesting part of the concern.

I would not send a poor girl into the world, ignorant of the snares that beset her path; nor would I watch and guard her, till, deprived of self-respect and self-reliance, she lost the power or the will to watch and guard herself.

Are you hero enough to unite yourself to one whom you know to be suspected and despised by all around you, and identify your interests and your honour with hers? Think! it is a serious thing.

Revenge! No — what good would that do? — it would make him no better, and me no happier.

He knows he is my sun, but when he chooses to withhold his light, he would have my sky to be all darkness; he cannot bear that I should have a moon to mitigate the deprivation.

If you had no higher motive than the approval of your fellow mortal, it would do you little good.

If you mean Mr. Weston to be one of your victims," said I, with affected indifference, "you will have to make such overtures yourself that you will find it difficult to draw back when he asks you to fulfil the expectations you have raised.