Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotations

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

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

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

Life is made up of marble and mud.

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.

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.

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.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

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

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

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.

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.

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.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may 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

She and her husband fell asleep with hands tenderly clasped, and awoke, from visions of unearthly radiance, to meet the more blessed light of one another's eyes.

Shame, Depair, Soltude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones,- and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

Shall we never, never get rid of this Past? cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.

Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone, as to any dependent on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected- alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even as she had not scorned to consider it desirable, she cast away the fragments of a broken chain.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, which cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet and artist has actually expressed

It is a good lesson /though it may often be a hard one /for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

It is not the statesman, the warrior, or the monarch that survives, but the despised poet, whom they may have fed with their crumbs, and to whom they owe that they are now or have a name

Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.

The Pyncheon Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the morning sunand a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leaftytongues a-whispering all at once. This ages tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the gale.It has kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of leaves, and the whole in perfect verdure,except a single branch, that, by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the autumn,had been transmuted to bright gold.

You are the only person in the world that was ever necessary to me.

And what shall we live on while I am writing it?

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

Is it a fact -- or have I dreamt it -- that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.

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

A bodily disease may be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual past

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

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

Great men have to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas, or perform their great deeds.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is to doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is, to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world

I love my mother, but there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between people of strong feelings.

Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.

Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream.

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

No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.

Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.

A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!

There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance; and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase 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

'What is the Unpardonable Sin' asked the lime-burner 'It is a sin that grew within my own breast', replied Ethan Brand 'The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God'.

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

As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.

Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.

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

See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize your Shame.

The trees reflected in the river - they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.

There is no greater bugbear than a strong willed relative in the circle of his own connections.

Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb.

Let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious to follow out one's day-dream to its natural consummation, although if the vision has been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.

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.

Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.

Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror.

...and we have so far improved upon the custom of Adam and Eve, that we generally furnish forth our feasts with a portion of some delicate calf or lamb, whose unspotted innocence entitles them to the happiness of becoming our sustenance.

But she named the infant "Pearl," as being of great price-purchased with all she had-her mother's only treasure!

It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money.

Every crime destroys more Edens than our own

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

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.

The washing of dishes does seem to me the most absurd and unsatisfactory business that I ever undertook. If, when once washed, they would remain clean for ever and ever (which they ought in all reason to do, considering how much trouble it is), there would be less occasion to grumble; but no sooner is it done, than it requires to be done again. On the whole, I have come to the resolution not to use more than one dish at each meal.

We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.

Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied.

I find myself at the extremity of a long beach. How gladly does the spirit leap forth, and suddenly enlarge its sense of being to the full extent of the broad, blue, sunny deep! A greeting and a homage to the Sea! I descend over its margin, and dip my hand into the wave that meets me, and bathe my brow. That far-resounding roar is the Ocean’s voice of welcome. His salt breath brings a blessing along with it.

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.

Men of cold passions have quick eyes.

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.

Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!

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.

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!

One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away.

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.

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.