“Can man be so age-stricken that no faintest sunshine of his youth may re visit him once a year? It is impossible. The moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into beauty; and the good old pastor, who once dwelt here, renewed his prime and regained his boyhood in the genial breeze of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy soul, if, whether in youth or age, it has outlived its privilege of springtime sprightliness!”
Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne
“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.”
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
“If cities were built by the sound of music, then some edifices would appear to be constructed by grave, solemn tones,--others to have danced forth to light fantastic airs.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“A man--poet, prophet, or whatever be may be--readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered.”
Source: The Blithedale Romance
“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
“A vast deal of human sympathy runs along the electric line of needlework, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humble seamstress.”
“Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.”
Source: Mosses from an Old Manse...: In Two Parts
“Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. That is, there must be an atmosphere of greatness round about them. A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.”
Source: Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Letters, Diaries, Reminiscences and Extensive Biographies: Autobiographical Writings of the Renowned American Novelist, Author of
“The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may going to prove one's self a fool.”
