Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne
This greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things-from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, "This, too, will pass away.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thoughts alone suffice them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
No fountain so small but that Heaven may be imaged in its bosom.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
If cities were built by the sound of music, then some edifices would appear to be constructed by grave, solemn tones,--others to have danced forth to light fantastic airs.

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

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

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne
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 to be obeyed.

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne
There is no greater bugbear than a strong willed relative in the circle of his own connections.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Let us forget the other names of American statesmen, that have been stamped upon these hills, but still call the loftiest — WASHINGTON. Mountains are Earth's undecaying monuments. They must stand while she endures, and never should be consecrated to the mere great men of their own age and country, but to the mighty ones alone, whose glory is universal, and whom all time will render illustrious.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!

Nathaniel Hawthorne
I love my mother, but there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between people of strong feelings.

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate the holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment good in itself, is not good to do religiously.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The world surely has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Never was there a dingier, uglier, less picturesque city than London... it is really wonderful that so much brick and stone, for centuries together, should have been built up with so poor a result.

Nathaniel Hawthorne