Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

Not yet hardened, many young die good.

Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

Sunlight is painting.

Happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release.

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

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.

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.

The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.

I do detest all offices - all, at least, that are held on a political tenure.

What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?

A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.

Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.

Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. [Speaking of self-posed isolation in old age.]

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.

There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.

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

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

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

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.