50 Important Quotes You Should Pay Attention to in Jane Eyre

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#11: “What necessity is there to dwell on the Past, when the Present is so much surer-the Future so much brighter?”

• Character: Mr Rochester 
  
• Technique: Tricolon, rhetorical question
  
• Chapter 27
  

#12: “It is always the way of events in this life,… no sooner have you got settled in a pleasant resting place, than a voice calls out to you to rise and move on, for the hour of repose is expired.”

• Character: Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Run-on sentence, romantic imagery
  
• Chapter 23
  

#13: “You are human and fallible.”

• Character: Jane, to Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Juxtaposition and dichotomy
  
• Chapter 14
  

#14: “But what is so headstrong as youth? What so blind as inexperience?”

• Character: Jane, reflecting on Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: rhetorical question
  
• Chapter 22
  

#15: “…they should not be confounded: appearance should not be mistaken for truth; narrow human doctrines, that only tend to elate and magnify a few, should not be substituted for the world-redeeming creed of Christ”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Biblical allusion, morality, tricolon
  
• Preface

Quotes about Love from Jane Eyre

#16: “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.”

• Character: Jane
• Technique: Factual tone, truncated sentence, anaphora
• Chapter 27

#17: “I have for the first time found what I can truly love – I have found you. You are my sympathy – my better self – my good angel – I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wrap my existence about you–and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.”

• Character: Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Cumulative listing, anaphora, run on-sentence, romantic language, metaphor
  
• Chapter 27
  

#18: “Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own: in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”

• Character: Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Hyperbole, allusion to wedding vows, intertextuality
  
• Chapter 27
  

#19: “All my heart is yours, sir: it belongs to you; and with you it would remain, were fate to exile the rest of me from your presence forever.”

• Character: Jane, to Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Hyperbole, exaggeration, metaphor
  
• Chapter 37
  

#20: “I have little left in myself – I must have you. The world may laugh – may call me absurd, selfish – but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied, or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.”

• Character: Mr Rochester, to Jane
  
• Technique: Imperatives, pause, metaphor, hyperbole
  
• Chapter 23
  

#21: “I ask you to pass through life at my side – to be my second self, and best earthly companion.”

• Character: Mr Rochester, to Jane
  
• Technique: Sibilance
  
• Chapter 23
  

#22: “Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, it would be my treasure still.”

• Character: Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Metaphor, repetition, possessive language
  
• Chapter 27
  

#23: “It is not violence that best overcomes hate – nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.”

• Character: Helen
  
• Technique: Factual tone
  
• Chapter 6
  

#24: “I loved him very much – more than I could trust myself to say – more than words had power to express.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Hyperbole, anaphora
  
• Chapter 24
  

#25: “I liked my name pronounced by your lips in a grateful, happy accent.”

• Character: Jane, to Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Personification
  
• Chapter 27
  

#26: “Plants will grow about your roots, whether you ask them or not, because they take delight in your bountiful shadow; and as they grow they will lean towards you, and wind round you, because your strength offers them so safe a prop.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Metaphor, imagery of nature,
  
• Chapter 37

Feminism Quotes from Jane Eyre

#27: “I am not an angel, and I will not be one till I die: 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.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Repetition, run-on sentence
  
• Chapter 24
  

#28: “I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Monosyllabic phrase
  
• Chapter 19
  

#29: “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, to 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.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Run-on sentence, imperatives
  
• Chapter 12
  

#30: “It is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Hyperbole
  
• Chapter 16
  

#31: “A beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance.”

• Character: Miss Temple
  
• Technique: Anaphora, repetition
  
• Chapter 8
  

#32: “To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth.”

• Character: Jane, to Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Declarative statement, monosyllabic
  
• Chapter 37
  

#33: “Gentle, soft dream, nestling in my arms now, you will fly, too, as your sisters have all fled before you: but kiss me before you go – embrace me, Jane.”

• Character: Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Descriptive language, romantic imagery
  
• Chapter 27
  

#34: “I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,–a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the well to which he has crept is poisoned, yet stoops and drinks divine draughts nevertheless.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Metaphor
  
• Chapter 17
  

#35: “I was for a while troubled with a haunting fear that if I handled the flower freely its bloom would fade.”

• Character: Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Metaphor
  
• Chapter 27

Religion and Faith

#36: “If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved of you and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.”

• Character: Helen
  
• Technique: Hyperbole, biblical allusion
  
• Chapter 8

#37: “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?”

• Character: Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Biblical allusion, rhetorical question
  
• Chapter 27
  

#38: “I am paving hell with energy… I am laying down good intentions which I believe durable as flint.”

• Character: Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Metaphor
  
• Chapter 14
  

#39: “To prolong doubt was to prolong hope.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Anaphora, juxtaposition
  
• Chapter 36
  

#40: “I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Repetition, tricolon, metaphor
  
• Chapter 10
  

#41: “It is hard work to control the workings of inclination and turn the bent of nature; but that it may be done, I know from experience.”

• Character: St John
  
• Technique: Romantic imagery
  
• Chapter 31
  

#42: “Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.”

• Character: Mr Rivers
  
• Technique: Moral tone
  
• Chapter 29

Social Hierarchy 

#43: “Do you think I am an automaton? A machine without feelings?.. Do you think, because i am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!”

• Character: Jane
• Technique: Rhetorical question, cumulative listing
• Chapter 23

#44: “I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are older than I, or because you have seen more of the world than I have; your claim to superiority depends on the use you have made of your time and experience.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Epiphora, run-on sentence
  
• Chapter 18
  

#45: “Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education: they grow there, firm as weeds among stones.”

• Character: Jane and Hannah
  
• Technique: Metaphor
  
• Chapter 29
  

#46: “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Repetition, tricolon
  
• Preface
  

#47: “Friends always forget those whom fortune forsakes.”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Fricative
  
• Chapter 27
  

#48: “What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms round what I value-to press my lips to what I love-to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice.”

• Character: Mr Rochester
  
• Technique: Rhetorical question, fricative, anaphora
  
• Chapter 37
  

#49: “Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words.”

• Character: Mr Lloyd
  
• Technique: Repetition
  
• Chapter 3
  

#50: “Poverty looks grim to grown people”

• Character: Jane
  
• Technique: Plosives
  
• Chapter 3