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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
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?
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
You are my evil spirit... you and the hard course world!
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
The young have less charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
God will give him blood to drink!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
Let the black flower blossom as it may!
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections; not that they gape so long and wide-but so quickly close again!
Nathaniel Hawthorne -
If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
Nathaniel Hawthorne