“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter: A Drama in Three Acts. From N. Hawthorne's Celebrated Novel
“Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.”
“Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!”
“...Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter (Sparklesoup Classics)
“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“The sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart... converted it into a tomb.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter (Sparklesoup Classics)
“There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”
Source: The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance
“The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.”
Source: The Portable Hawthorne
“A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere.”
Source: Tales and sketches
“No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.”
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
“The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.”
Source: Selected Tales and Sketches
“To do nothing is the way to be nothing.”
“It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man... to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”
Source: CliffsComplete The Scarlet Letter
“His stories are good to hear at night, because we can dream about them asleep; and good in the morning, too, because then we can dream about them awake. (Cowslip)”
Source: Wonder Book & Tanglewood Tales – Greatest Stories from Greek Mythology for Children (Illustrated): Captivating Stories of Epic Heroes and Heroines from the Renowned American Author of
“And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.”
“She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.”
Source: Little Masterpieces
“She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.”
“In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence.”
“Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind.”
Source: Mosses from an Old Manse
“She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter - Second Edition: A Romance
“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.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter (Annotated And Illustrated Edition)
“She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter - Second Edition: A Romance
“Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world , individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. (Wakefield)”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)
“I sometimes fancy," said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene always made a strong impression, "that Rome--mere Rome--will crowd everything else out of my heart.”
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
“When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)
“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”
Source: Tales and sketches
“Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?”
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
“It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thoughts alone suffice them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.”
Source: CliffsComplete The Scarlet Letter
“All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)
“To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter Thrift Study Edition
“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.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.”
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 not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release.”
“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.”
“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.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness... Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods... The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”
“it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“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.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter (Sparklesoup Classics)
“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.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)
“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.”
“If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!”
“What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.”
Source: Love letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1839-1863
“Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.”
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
“Would all, who cherish such wild wishes, but look around them, they would oftenest find their sphere of duty, of prosperity, and happiness, within those precincts, and in that station where Providence itself has cast their lot. Happy they who read the riddle without a weary world-search, or a lifetime spent in vain!”
Source: Tales and sketches
“Generosity is the flower of justice.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“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.”
Source: Dark Tales (Illustrated Edition): Gothic Classics:
