Nathaniel Hawthorne quotes - page 5
[H]e was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded by his study.
Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his intellect.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
"What is the Unpardonable Sin?" asked the lime-burner; and then he shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should be answered. "It is a sin that grew within my own breast," replied Ethan Brand, standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp. "A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
To persons whose pursuits are insulated from the common business of life-who are either in advance of mankind or apart from it-there often comes a sensation of moral cold that makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached the frozen solitudes around the pole. What the prophet, the poet, the reformer, the criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but separated from the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen felt.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
But is it alive?" exclaimed she again; and the finger on which the gorgeous mystery had alighted was so tremulous that the butterfly was forced to balance himself with his wings. "Tell me if it be alive, or whether you created it. But"-and here his countenance somewhat changed-"this butterfly is not now to me what it was when I beheld it afar off in a daydream of my youth.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed steadily into his face.
"They tell me you have been all over the earth," said he, wringing his hands with earnestness. "You must have seen my daughter, for she makes a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?"
Ethan Brand's eye quailed beneath the old man's. That daughter, from whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Heaven! What have I done?" exclaimed he. "The vapor, the influence of that brute force,-it has bewildered me and obscured my perception. I have made the very stroke-the fatal stroke-that I have dreaded from the first. It is all over-the toil of months, the object of my life. I am ruined!"
And there he sat, in strange despair, until his lamp flickered in the socket and left the Artist of the Beautiful in darkness.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
