Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

224 Sourced Quotes

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
The hand of one person may express more than the face of another.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

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
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
At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Life certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is a suggestive idea to track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden ever since they were the tender and rosy little feet of a baby, and (cold as they now are) were kept warm in his mother's hand.

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
Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one — none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance — to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief, perhaps none at all; but you keep taking off one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus, including the whole value of the matter. It proves, however, that there is no such nucleus, and that chastity is diffused through the whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
We must not think too unkindly even of the east wind. It is not, perhaps, a wind to be loved, even in its benignest moods; but there are seasons when I delight to feel its breath upon my cheek, though it be never advisable to throw open my bosom and take it into my heart, as I would its gentle sisters of the south and west.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nervous and excitable persons need to talk a great deal, by way of letting off their steam.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
A human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Unquestionably we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world; and I myself have felt the heart-throb at sight of it, as sensibly as other men.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
"What is the Unpardonable Sin?" asked the lime-burner; and then he shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should be answered. "It is a sin that grew within my own breast," replied Ethan Brand, standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp. "A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
It was a day in early spring; and as that sweet, genial time of year and atmosphere calls out tender greenness from the ground,--beautiful flowers, or leaves that look beautiful because so long unseen under the snow and decay,--so the pleasant air and warmth had called out three young people, who sat on a sunny hill-side enjoying the warm day and one another.

Nathaniel Hawthorne