Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

224 Sourced Quotes

If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.

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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Long, long may it be, ere he comes again! His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader's step pollute our soil, still may the Gray Champion come, for he is the type of New England's hereditary spirit; and his shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge, that New England's sons will vindicate their ancestry.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.

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

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
Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious to follow out one's day-dream to its natural consummation, although if the vision has been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
As far as my experience goes, men of genius are fairly gifted with the social qualities; and in this age, there appears to be a fellow-feeling among them, which had not heretofore been developed. As men, they ask nothing better than to be on equal terms with their fellow-men; and as authors, they have thrown aside their proverbial jealousy, and acknowledge a generous brotherhood.

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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,—call it which you will,—is a book of travels, describing scenes the most unlike that sombre one

Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is often instructive to take the woman's, the private and domestic view, of a public man; nor can anything be more curious than the vast discrepancy between portraits intended for engraving, and the pencil-sketches that pass from hand to hand, behind the original's back.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or — and the outward semblance is the same — crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Speaking of self-posed isolation in old age:
Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Bees are sometimes drowned (or suffocated) in the honey which they collect. So some writers are lost in their collected learning.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.

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

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart... converted it into a tomb.

Nathaniel Hawthorne