Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

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.

There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings as now in October.

Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.

It [the scarlet letter] had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds-the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.

The love of science to rival the love of woman, in its depth and absorbing energy.

Writing can come naturally to some. Still, when it comes to good writing, this is true: Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves.

It was a day in early spring; and as that sweet, genial time of year and atmosphere calls out tender greenness from the ground,--beautiful flowers, or leaves that look beautiful because so long unseen under the snow and decay,--so the pleasant air and warmth had called out three young people, who sat on a sunny hill-side enjoying the warm day and one another.

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.

Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.

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.

She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.

We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate the holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment good in itself, is not good to do religiously.

Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,—call it which you will,—is a book of travels, describing scenes the most unlike that sombre one

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.

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

Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!

Happiness is like a butterfly.

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

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

The traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude.

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.

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?

Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation.

When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod-or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly-thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude.

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.

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.

Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster-and thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster--without man, as her acknowledged principal!

Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.

And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.

Moonlight is sculpture.

She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

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.

The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.

Happiness is like a butterfly - the more you chase, the more subtle, but if you stop moving and quietly wait for it to land on you.

To-morrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame.

There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about.

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

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.

If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom.

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.

It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.

As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.