Nathaniel Hawthorne quotes - page 8

Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer, best known for works such as "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables." His writing often explores themes of sin, morality, and the complexities of human nature. He is remembered as a major figure in nineteenth-century American literature. Here are 181 of his quotes:

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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

I do detest all offices - all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. And 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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining... my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased - what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself?

Nathaniel Hawthorne

When we have once known Rome, and left her [...], we are astonished by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heartstrings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more ultimately our home, than even the spot where we were born.

Nathaniel Hawthorne