A retouched portrait of Emily Brontë / Photo via Wikimedia

Biographile’s This Week in History remembers events of the past, and the icons that set them in motion. If the below isn't enough for you, read more inspiring author quotes.

This week, we celebrate the July 30th birthday of Emily Brontë. The Brontë sisters are a literary legacy like no other: three talented, forward-thinking women whose creative contribution to the world was cut short by sickness, death, and the limitations of era in which they lived. Each would pen at least one novel with shocking content focusing on themes like female suppression and oppressive social convention. And each would die before the age of forty.

Emily's pièce de résistance was her only novel, Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, the year before she died. It came out to mixed critical reception but was later edited and re-released by her older sister Charlotte in 1850. In large part, Wuthering Heights grew in popularity because of its frequent attachment to Jane Eyre and early deaths of the sisters. In the years immediately after Charlotte died, the notion that Jane Eyre was simply a better book went unquestioned. But later critical response would begin to find Wuthering Heights superior, leading to a resurgence of interest in Emily's work.

One thing is indisputable: all of the Brontë sisters had considerable wisdom and insight to share with the world, despite their short, relatively isolated lives. So to mark Emily's birthday, we've collected some sage words from the mouths of her most beloved characters.

1. "A sensible man ought to find sufficient company in himself." (Wuthering Heights, 1847)

2. "Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves." (Wuthering Heights, 1847)

3. "A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad." (Wuthering Heights, 1847)

4. "A person who has not done one half his day's work by ten o'clock runs a chance of leaving the other half undone." (Wuthering Heights, 1847)

5. "It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn." (Wuthering Heights, 1847)

6. "The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them." (Wuthering Heights, 1847)

7. "Any relic of the dead is precious, if they were valued living." (Wuthering Heights, 1847)

8. "Treachory and violence are spears pointed at both ends — they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies." (Wuthering Heights, 1847)