Nathaniel Hawthorne

Quotes

• “What is the Unpardonable Sin?" asked the lime-burner; and then he shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his ...”
• “The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of ou...”
• “Lo, there ye stand, my children," said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad with its despairing awfulness, ...”
• “It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in it...”
• “Heaven! What have I done?" exclaimed he. "The vapor, the influence of that brute force,-it has bewildered me and obscure...”
• “Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, ...”
• “Let us forget the other names of American statesmen, that have been stamped upon these hills, but still call the lofties...”
• “Scattered... over the breasts of the surrounding mountains there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes... or clo...”
• “Long, long may it be, ere he comes again! His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyr...”
• “[H]e was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and wo...”
• “As far as my experience goes, men of genius are fairly gifted with the social qualities; and in this age, there appears ...”
• “But is it alive?" exclaimed she again; and the finger on which the gorgeous mystery had alighted was so tremulous that t...”
• “It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for ...”
• “Is it a fact - or have I dreamt it - that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrati...”
• “The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his l...”
• “It is curious, how a man may travel along a country road, and yet miss the grandest, or sweetest of prospects, by reason...”
• “I feel that I descended from Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf, and then a Chinese man told me how...”
• “There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably com...”
• “She named the minister; and the moment she did so, all the reserve melted away, and burst into tears. Not, however, that...”
• “Long ago Hawthorne called our attention to the fact that philanthropy ruins, or is fearfully apt to ruin, the heart, "th...”
• “Poets have imagined no utterance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh. And even the obtuse lime-b...”
• “When we have once known Rome, and left her […], we are astonished by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heartstrings hav...”
• “I do detest all offices - all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. And I want nothing to do with politicians....”
• “The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariab...”
• “If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The...”
• “Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose ...”
• “By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places - whether in church, bedchamber, street, ...”
• “It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with in...”
• “In view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a p...”
• “Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one a...”
• “Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: -...”
• “I am always so dazzled and bewildered with the richness, the depth, the … jewels of beauty in his productions that I am ...”
• “The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest h...”
• “Also attributed to Ernest Hemingway and others; the earliest definite occurrence of this yet found in research for Wikiq...”
• “It is a suggestive idea to track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden ever since they were t...”
• “Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty." - Charles Simmons, Laconic Manual and Brief Remarker...”
• “When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses...”
• “I seriously wished-selfish as it may appear-that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a century, or,...”
• “The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was ...”
• “In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the inte...”
• “Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possib...”
• “In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent...”
• “There was nothing so antipodal to his nature as this man's cold, unimaginative sagacity, by contact with which everythin...”
• “She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial wit...”
• “Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a...”
• “The opening and closing lines of the remarkable page-long sentence that constitutes the first paragraph of the chapter a...”
• “William Cowper Prime in The Old House by the River (1853); first misattributed to Hawthorne in Notable Thoughts about Wo...”
• “If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame, which, dream...”
• “Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of...”
• “Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to othe...”