Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

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

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool.. view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sunlight is painting... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing.. view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream.. view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty.. view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

All brave men love.. view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Easy reading is damn hard writing... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world... view

By: 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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life is made up of marble and mud... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Moonlight is sculpture... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne

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... view

By: Nathaniel Hawthorne