Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
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On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.
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The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
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Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
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I do detest all offices - all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. And I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much.
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There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.
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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
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The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones, - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
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By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places - whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest - where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.
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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 in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.
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Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.
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No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
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In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.
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Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.
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Moonlight is sculpture.
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The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
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It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.
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Poets have imagined no utterance of fiends or hobgoblins so fearfully appropriate as a laugh. And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his nerves shaken, as this strange man looked inward at his own heart, and burst into laughter that rolled away into the night, and was indistinctly reverberated among the hills.
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You are my evil spirit... you and the hard course world!
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We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
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Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
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A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.
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If his inmost heart could have been laid open, there would have been discovered that dream of undying fame, which, dream as it is, is more powerful than a thousand realities.
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What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?
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In heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more melodious than Milton's song. Then, would he add another verse to any strain that he had left unfinished here?