Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
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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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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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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 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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Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.
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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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Let the black flower blossom as it may!
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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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The young have less charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth.
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I have not lived, but only dreamed about living.
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God will give him blood to drink!
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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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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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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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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.
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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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'Never, never!' whispered she. 'What we did had a consecration of its own.'
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She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.
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Easy reading is damn hard writing.