Nathaniel Hawthorne quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne on Wise Famous Quotes.

Not yet hardened, many young die good.

Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair.

People always grow more foolish, unless they take care to grow wiser and wiser ...

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?

Dream strange things and make them look like truth.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard

Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one.

There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.

If it be a sign of mourning," replied Mr. Hooper, "I, perhaps, like most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by a black veil.

God", said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, "God will give him blood to drink!

The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

A grave and dark-clad company, quoth Goodman Brown.

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

Development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.

Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.

The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I have learned how to talk with hens and chickens.

Sunlight is painting.

If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.

evil is the nature of mankind.

Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror.

Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.

With Heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the Devil!

I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself." "Men sometimes are so," said her husband.

This dull river has a deep religion of its own; so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously.

It is because the spirit is inestimable, that the lifeless body is so little valued.

Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread.

The closer you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared.

A man
poet, prophet, or whatever be may be
readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

The sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all so bright.

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

Every crime destroys more Edens than our own

Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister as his black veil to them.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.

Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild hallucination.

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.

Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

Some maladies are rich and precious, and only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so in exorable as one's self!

This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.

Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.

Next to the lightest heart, the heaviest is apt to be most playful.

It loves more readily than it hates.

A stale article, if you did it in a good, warm, sunny smile will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon.

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

Those with whom we can apparently become well acquainted in a few moments are generally the most difficult to rightly know and to understand.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

It [the scarlet letter] had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind.

You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.

Let us not look back, the past is gone! Wherefore should we linger upon it now?

Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman's heart! She will not speak!

We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods.

That old woman taught me my catechism! said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.

There is no greater bugbear than a strong willed relative in the circle of his own connections.

Thou shalt say a thousand things, and saying them a thousand times over, thou shalt still have said nothing!

But never had their youthful beauty seemed so pure and high, as when its glow was chastened by adversity.

The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death.

What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!

MAY AND NOVEMBER VI.

It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested.

No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee.

As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.

O exquisite relief! She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom! By

The horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!

Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.

A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away.

You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction.

This shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind to anybody again as long as I live.

Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it.

Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!

Keep the imagination sane
that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.

Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession.

Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?

Generosity is the flower of justice.

O, what a joy for a shy man to feel himself so solitary, that he may lift his voice to its highest pitch without hazard of a listener!

Entire development would secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement; the higher the state the

A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.

Preach! Write! Act! Do anything save to lie down and die.

It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts ...

My wife is - in the strictest sense - my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart.

This above all: be true, be true, be true.

A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.