QuoteProject
Conventionality is not morality.
Charlotte Bronte
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Conventional norms do not necessarily define what is right or wrong.

This quote by Charlotte Bronte emphasizes the distinction between societal norms and true morality. It suggests that just because something is conventional or widely accepted does not mean it is inherently moral or ethical. Bronte encourages individuals to think critically about societal standards and to not blindly follow them if they conflict with one's personal sense of right and wrong.

Themes

MoralityConventionalityEthicsSocietyIndividuality

In practice

Example use cases

During a debate on social norms, one could use this quote to argue for ethical individuality.

More from Charlotte Bronte

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.
Charlotte BronteRead
Rochester: "I am no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut-tree in Thornfield orchard…And what right would that ruin have to bid a budding woodbine cover its decay with freshness?" Jane: "You are no ruin sir - no lighting-struck tree: you are green and vigorous. 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.
Charlotte BronteRead
I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me.
Charlotte BronteRead
Peril, loneliness, an uncertain future, are not oppressive evils, so long as the frame is healthy and the faculties are employed; so long, especially, as Liberty lends us her wings, and Hope guides us by her star.
Charlotte BronteRead
For a long time the fear of seeming singular scared me away; but by degrees, as people became accustomed to me and my habits, and to such shadows of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature - shades, certainly not striking enough to interest, and perhaps not prominent enough to offend, but born in and with me, and no more to be parted with than my identity - but slow degrees I became a frequenter of this straight narrow path.
Charlotte BronteRead
But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?-I believe; I have faith: I am going to God.-Where is God? What is God?-My maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created. I rely implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to Him, reveal Him to me.
Charlotte BronteRead

Similar quotes

Whoever lives among many evils just as I, how can dying not be a source of gain?
SophoclesRead
It's so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.
Harold PinterRead
Let us understand that God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation.
Saint AugustineRead
He gazes through sunlight's buttresses, back down the refectory at the others, wallowing in their plenitude of bananas, thick palatals of their hunger lost somewhere in the stretch of morning between them and himself. A hundred miles of it, so suddenly. Solitude, even among the meshes of this war, can when it wishes so take him by the blind gut and touch, as now, possessively. Pirate's again some other side of a window, watching strangers eat breakfast.
Thomas PynchonRead
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of the divinity itself; and can never be erased.
Alexander HamiltonRead
There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
Richard RortyRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.