“There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted the Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as part of the retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly error, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain. A knowledge of men's hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that problem. And I conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding such secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“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, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble imbue of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“It would break her dear little heart; and I'd rather break my own!”
Source: Young Goodman Brown
“When individuals approach one another with deep purposes on both sides they seldom come at once to the matter which they have most at heart. They dread the electric shock of a too sudden contact with it.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)
“An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them.”
Source: Mosses from an Old Manse
“I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.”
“If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever.”
Source: Passages from the English Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Unquestionably we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world; and I myself have felt the heart-throb at sight of it, as sensibly as other men.”
Source: Passages From The French And Italian Note-Books (Annotated Edition)
“We are but shadows: we are, not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us--then we begin to be--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity.”
Source: Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“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
“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
“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.”
“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
“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)
“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!”
“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
“My wife is - in the strictest sense - my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart.”
Source: The Business of Reflection: Hawthorne in His Notebooks
“New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.”
Source: Rappaccini's Daughter (Gothic Classic): A Medieval Dark Tale from Padua by the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“There can be...no power...to disclose...the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them until the day when all hidden things be revealed.”
“Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!”
“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)
“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
“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
“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)
“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
“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.”
“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.”
“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)
“What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his 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
“I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; -neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.”
“Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden.... It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart.”
Source: The American notebooks
“In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.”
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)
“I heard a neigh. Oh, such a brisk and melodious neigh it was. My very heart leapt with the sound.”
“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.”
“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”
“I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you.”
Source: The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne
“Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated)
“Or-but this more rarely happened-she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.”
Source: The Scarlet Letter
“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.”
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
