Nathaniel Hawthorne quotes

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Life is made up of marble and mud.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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.”

— 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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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. Nathaniel Hawthorne”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Sunlight is painting.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Moonlight is sculpture.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne