Nathaniel hawthorne quotes

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.

...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.

Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it.

It was a day in early spring; and as that sweet, genial time of year and atmosphere calls out tender greenness from the ground,--beautiful flowers, or leaves that look beautiful because so long unseen under the snow and decay,--so the pleasant air and warmth had called out three young people, who sat on a sunny hill-side enjoying the warm day and one another.

Some illusions...are the shadows of great truths.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

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.

Sunlight is painting.

Is it a fact-or have I dreamt it-that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!

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

Moonlight is sculpture.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

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.

Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.

Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb.

And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.

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.

Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.

We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.

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

The trees reflected in the river - they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.

The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view

If human love hath power to penetrate the veil--and hath it not?--then there are yet living here a few who have the blessedness of knowing that an angel loves them.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

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.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

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.

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.

Just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God's care and pity for every separate need.

What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?

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

Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.

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.

A man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.

There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings as now in October.

Do anything, save to lie down and die!

She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.

The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!

Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.

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.

You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.

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

Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.

We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.

When scattered clouds are resting on the bosoms of hills, it seems as if one might climb into the heavenly region, earth being so intermixed with sky, and gradually transformed into it.

Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror.

The breath of peace was fanning her glorious brow, her head was bowed a very little forward, and a tress, escaping from its bonds, fell by the side of her pure white temple, and close to her just opened lips; it hung there motionless! no breath disturbed its repose! She slept as an angel might sleep, having accomplished the mission of her God.

That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.

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!

The washing of dishes does seem to me the most absurd and unsatisfactory business that I ever undertook. If, when once washed, they would remain clean for ever and ever (which they ought in all reason to do, considering how much trouble it is), there would be less occasion to grumble; but no sooner is it done, than it requires to be done again. On the whole, I have come to the resolution not to use more than one dish at each meal.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may going to prove one's self a fool.

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.

This above all: be true, be true, be true.

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.

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

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

Happiness is like a butterfly.

Ugliness without tact is horrible.

Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.

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.

Dream strange things and make them look like truth.

Men of cold passions have quick eyes.

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

Man's own youth is the world's youth; at least he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.

What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.

Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.

A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.

What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.

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.

My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.

I heard a neigh. Oh, such a brisk and melodious neigh it was. My very heart leapt with the sound.

Let the attempt be made, at whatever risk.

Generosity is the flower of justice.

Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

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.

Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty.

I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God's making it in reality.

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

There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one.

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

Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!

She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.

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.

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

A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.

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.

Death should take me while I am in the mood.

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

Happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release.

Cupid in these latter times has probably laid aside his bow and arrow, and uses fire-arms -- a pistol -- perhaps a revolver.

Families are always rising and falling in America.

There is an alchemy of quiet malice by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.

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.

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

There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance; and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase it.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.

I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.

Though we speak nonsense, God will pick out the meaning of it.

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

Happiness is like a butterfly - the more you chase, the more subtle, but if you stop moving and quietly wait for it to land on you.

The inward pleasure of imparting pleasure - that is the choicest of all.

This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.

There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.

The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring.

Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

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.

The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become.