Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (110 Quotes)

Dr Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.

Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.

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

Just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a love-born of Gods care for every need.

Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden ... It is sad that nature will play such tricks with us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, tricking us to the heart.

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

Punishment of a miser - to pay the drafts of his heir in his tomb

My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.

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.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.