Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (110 Quotes)


    We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

    In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.





    O the blazing tropic night, when the wake's a welt of light That holds the hot sky tame, And the steady forefoot snores through the planet-powdered floors Where the scared whale flukes in flame. Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass, And her ropes are taut with the dew, For we're booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, We're sagging south on the Long Trail the trail that is always new.



    I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State --neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.


    Man's own youth is the world's youth at least he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.

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

    What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.

    A bodily disease may be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual past



    Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.


    Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison.

    It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.


    Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.

    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.

    Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream

    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.

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

    The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view

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

    It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

    See those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth Then recognize your Shame.

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

    Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing.



    Is it a fact - or have I dreamt it - that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence.

    Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.

    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.

    Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

    No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

    Yesterday I 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. The present is burdened too much with the past.

    Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

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

    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.

    No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

    It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at the bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge each renders one individual dependent for the food of

    Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone, as to any dependent on society, and with little Pearl to be gui

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

    The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.




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