Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotations

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

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

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

Life is made up of marble and mud.

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.

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.

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.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

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

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

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.

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.

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

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, which cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet and artist has actually expressed

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may 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

Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone, as to any dependent on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected- alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even as she had not scorned to consider it desirable, she cast away the fragments of a broken chain.

Shall we never, never get rid of this Past? cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.

Shame, Depair, Soltude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones,- and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

She and her husband fell asleep with hands tenderly clasped, and awoke, from visions of unearthly radiance, to meet the more blessed light of one another's eyes.

It is not the statesman, the warrior, or the monarch that survives, but the despised poet, whom they may have fed with their crumbs, and to whom they owe that they are now or have a name

It is a good lesson --though it may often be a hard one --for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

It is a good lesson /though it may often be a hard one /for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.

The Pyncheon Elm, throughout its great circumference, was all alive, and full of the morning sunand a sweet-tempered little breeze, which lingered within this verdant sphere, and set a thousand leaftytongues a-whispering all at once. This ages tree appeared to have suffered nothing from the gale.It has kept its boughs unshattered, and its full complement of leaves, and the whole in perfect verdure,except a single branch, that, by the earlier change with which the elm-tree sometimes prophesies the autumn,had been transmuted to bright gold.

Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and 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, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burthened too much with the past.

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.

Dr Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.

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?

You are the only person in the world that was ever necessary to me.

And what shall we live on while I am writing it?

Punishment of a miser - to pay the drafts of his heir in his tomb

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

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

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is to 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 to be obeyed.

A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world

A bodily disease may be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual past

Great men have to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas, or perform their great deeds.

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.

Death should take me while I am in the mood.

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

Sunlight is painting.

Moonlight is sculpture.

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.

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

A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at all ; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter. It proves, however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl.

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.

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.

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!

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea.

Ugliness without tact is horrible.

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

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.

Generosity is the flower of justice.

It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.

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.

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.

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.

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

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

Do anything, save to lie down and die!

Faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows - standing without, you can see no glory, nor can imagine any, but standing within every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.

I have come to see the nonsense of trying to describe fine scenery.

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