Nathaniel Hawthorne quotes - page 7

Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
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. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had mediated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Some maladies are rich and precious and only to be Acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them then pray that your grieves may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
To-morrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility. from The Scarlet Letter. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
See those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth Then recognize your Shame. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State --neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Yesterday I 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. The present is burdened too much with the past. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Of all the events which constitute a persons biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a love-born of Gods care for every need. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden ... It is sad that nature will play such tricks with us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, tricking us to the heart. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
It was one of those moments-which sometimes occur only at the interval of years-when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Work is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne