Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burthened too much with the past.
More Quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne:
We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sunlight is painting.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Zealots have an idol, to which they consecrate themselves high-priests, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Based on Topics: Generation Quotes, Hope Quotes, Past Quotes, Present QuotesBased on Keywords: frieze, hewn, mummies, parthenon
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