Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
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Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.
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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?
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What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
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Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.
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In a word, the heavy weight upon his spirits kept everything in order, not merely within his own system, but wheresoever the iron accents of the church clock were audible.
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Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever.
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I seriously wished-selfish as it may appear-that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.
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Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
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If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever.
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I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.
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The young have less charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth.
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When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of the reality.
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I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.
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Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one - none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance - to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
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The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.
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Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.
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God will give him blood to drink!
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Let the black flower blossom as it may!
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Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.
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She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.
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You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.
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There was nothing so antipodal to his nature as this man's cold, unimaginative sagacity, by contact with which everything was converted into a dream except the densest matter of the physical world.
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It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections; not that they gape so long and wide-but so quickly close again!
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All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.