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Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

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Famous Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

“A man will commit almost any wrong,—he will heap up an immense pile of wickedness, as hard as granite, and which will weigh as heavily upon his soul, to eternal ages,—only to build a great, gloomy, dark-chambered mansion, for him to die in, and for his posterity to be miserable in. He lays his own dead corpse beneath the underpinning, as one may say, and hangs his frowning picture on the wall, and, after thus converting himself into an evil destiny, expects his remotest great-grandchildren to be happy there!”

“It is very singular how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them.”

“There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”