“Those with whom we can apparently become well acquainted in a few moments are generally the most difficult to rightly know and to understand.”
“The Christian faith is a grand cathedral with divinely pictured windows.”
Source: The Marble Faun
“Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beautiful results--the fragrance of celestial flowers--to the daily life of others.”
Source: Mosses from an Old Manse
“Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.”
Source: The house of the seven gables
“Death possesses a good deal, of real estate, namely, the graveyard in every town.”
“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.”
“It is not strange that that early love of the heart should come back, as it so often does when the dim eye is brightening with its last light. It is not strange that the freshest fountains the heart has ever known in its wastes should bubble up anew when the lifeblood is growing stagnant. It is not strange that a bright memory should come to a dying old man, as the sunshine breaks across the hills at the close of a stormy day; nor that in the light of that ray, the very clouds that made the day dark should grow gloriously beautiful.”
“There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“If we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster.”
Source: Complete Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition): Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, The Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, Grimshawe's Secret and Biography
“There is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow--the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“The breath of peace was fanning her glorious brow, her head was bowed a very little forward, and a tress, escaping from its bonds, fell by the side of her pure white temple, and close to her just opened lips; it hung there motionless! no breath disturbed its repose! She slept as an angel might sleep, having accomplished the mission of her God.”
“Women are safer in perilous situations and emergencies than men, and might be still more so if they trusted themselves more confidingly to the chivalry of manhood.”
Source: The Marble Faun
“Ugliness without tact is horrible.”
Source: The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: The American notebooks
“Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.”
“We must not think too unkindly even of the east wind. It is not, perhaps, a wind to be loved, even in its benignest moods; but there are seasons when I delight to feel its breath upon my cheek, though it be never advisable to throw open my bosom and take it into my heart, as I would its gentle sisters of the south and west.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!”
Source: The Blithedale Romance
“At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Life certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day.”
“To be left alone in the wide world with scarcely a friend,--this makes the sadness which, striking its pang into the minds of the young and the affectionate, teaches them too soon to watch and interpret the spirit-signs of their own hearts.”
“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.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.”
Source: The Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Novels, Short Stories, Poems, Essays, Letters and Memoirs (Illustrated): The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, Tanglewood Tales, Birthmark, Ghost of Doctor Harris… (Including Biographies and Literary Criticism)
“Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,-in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?”
“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”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)
“The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“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.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“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!”
Source: Complete Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition): Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, The Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, Grimshawe's Secret and Biography
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.”
“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.”
Source: Mosses from an Old Manse (Annotated Edition)
“Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.”
Source: Passages from the American Note-books of 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.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty.”
“A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter (Sparklesoup Classics)
“Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”
Source: The Marble Faun
“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!”
“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”
“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.”
Source: Complete Novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition): Fanshawe, The Scarlet Letter with its Adaptation, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun, The Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton, Grimshawe's Secret and Biography
“Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“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.”
Source: SAT Words from Literature - the Scarlet Letter
“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.”
Source: Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels: Scarlet Letter / House of Seven Gables / Blithedale Romance / Fanshawe / Marble Faun: Library of America #10
“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.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“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.”
Source: The house of the seven gables
“A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“Life is made up of marble and mud.”
“Sunlight is painting.”
Source: Portable Hawthorne
“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.”
