Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

224 Sourced Quotes

At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
This dull river has a deep religion of its own; so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Is it a fact — or have I dreamed 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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
It will startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times-to Death, if we give the matter the right word!... We read in Dead Men's books! We laugh at Dead Men's jokes, and cry at Dead Men's pathos!... Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man's icy hand obstructs us!

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Perhaps, if we could penetrate Nature's secrets, we should find that what we call weeds are more essential to the well-being of the world than the most precious fruit or grain.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and the mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
If we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Can man be so age-stricken that no faintest sunshine of his youth may re visit him once a year? It is impossible. The moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into beauty; and the good old pastor, who once dwelt here, renewed his prime and regained his boyhood in the genial breeze of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy soul, if, whether in youth or age, it has outlived its privilege of springtime sprightliness!

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Who can tell where happiness may come, or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face?

Nathaniel Hawthorne