Top 100 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
#1. When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#2. The staunch, old soakers, on the other hand men who, if put on tap, would have yielded a red alcoholic liquor, by way of blood usually confined themselves to plain brandy-and-water, gin, or West India rum; and,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#3. What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#4. I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#5. 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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#7. You are partly crazy, and partly imbecile; a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,
though some in less degree, or less perceptibly, than their fellows.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#8. It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#9. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#11. 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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#13. Sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles;
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#15. Happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release ...
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#16. This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old house [with dry rot in its structure and perhaps also in its inhabitants]; ... it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere that that.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#17. 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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#19. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken. It
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#21. Or this: - that the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breadth out of the beaten track.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#22. Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#25. What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#26. Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the carving knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits) that the grinder might apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#27. This greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things-from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, This, too, will pass away.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#28. Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#30. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it ... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#31. Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#32. 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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#33. I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself." "Men sometimes are so," said her husband.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#35. The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#37. Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#38. With the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#39. But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#40. What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scicpio. "And what for do you look so black at me?"
"No matter, darky," said the carpenter. "Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#41. Unquestionably we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world; and I myself have felt the heart-throb at sight of it, as sensibly as other men.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#42. Development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#43. Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#45. You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#46. Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#47. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport; because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#48. Struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#49. That old woman taught me my catechism! said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#50. The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#51. Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#52. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#53. We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#54. At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#55. I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth and complains of lonesomeness at her mother's side. Shall I put these feelings into words?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#56. The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#57. What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#58. He whose genius appears deepest and truest excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws out occasionally a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is profoundly though unutterably conscious.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#59. The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#62. Distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#63. Clifford, except for Phoebe's more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair, till eventide.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#64. How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and evenly coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#65. 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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#68. What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#69. For when a man's spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offenses, but never resentful of great ones.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#70. A throng of bearded men in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and other bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#71. All have some artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine characteristic.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#72. If human love hath power to penetrate the veil
and hath it not?
then there are yet living here a few who have the blessedness of knowing that an angel loves them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#73. The influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#74. These feelings, together with the deep degradation of his mind, made him resolve that no circumstances should again draw him into an axcess of wine.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#75. A poor, deceived, and half-delirious girl, who, exclaiming that she was the most worthless thing alive or dead, attempted to cast herself into the fire amid all that wrecked and broken trumpery of the world.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#77. If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom ...
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#78. And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom, while out of a still lower depth came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#79. In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first; we return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#80. If we would know what heaven is before we come thither, let us retire into the depths of our own spirits, and we shall find it there among holy thoughts and feelings.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#81. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#82. Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#83. It is very singular how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#84. It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#87. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#89. It is a strange experience for a man of pride and feeling to know that his interests are in the control of strangers who don't like or understand him.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#90. As the life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other human beings, there remained a duty towards him,
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#91. He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies out of them ...
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#92. There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#93. Who can tell where happiness may come, or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#94. 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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#95. She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#96. Death possesses a good deal, of real estate, namely, the graveyard in every town.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#97. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that with mine own blood!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#98. Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you can see no glory, nor can imagine any, but standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#100. Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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