Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Featured in: Reading Quotes

2. “Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Featured in: Influence Quotes, Honesty Quotes

3. “No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Featured in: Be Yourself Quotes, Human Nature Quotes, Depression Quotes, Honesty Quotes

4. “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

5. “She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

6. “Families are always rising and falling in America.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

7. “Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

8. “Generosity is the flower of justice.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

9. “Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

10. “We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

11. “Happiness is like a butterfly – the more you chase, the more subtle, but if you stop moving and quietly wait for it to land on you.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

12. “If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

13. “To do nothing is the way to be nothing.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

14. “Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

15. “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

16. “Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

17. “Writing can come naturally to some. Still, when it comes to good writing, this is true: Easy reading is damn hard writing.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Featured in: Reading Quotes

18. “The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

19. “Benevolence is the twin of pride.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

20. “Happiness is like a butterfly...”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

21. “Masculine observers, if the birth-mark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness, without the semblance of a flaw.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

22. “A woman’s chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

23. “Life is made up of marble and mud.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

24. “My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

25. “What we call real estate – the solid ground to build a house on – is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

26. “It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

27. “Cupid in these latter times has probably laid aside his bow and arrow, and uses fire-arms – a pistol – perhaps a revolver.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

29. “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

30. “Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Featured in: Romance Quotes

31. “Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

32. “Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

33. “Blessed are all simple emotions, be they dark or bright! It is the lurid intermixture of the two that produces the illuminating blaze of the infernal regions.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

34. “In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence...”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

35. “There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

36. “Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

37. “Sunlight is like the breath of life to the pomp of autumn.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

38. “Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

39. “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

40. “Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

41. “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

42. “No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

43. “Mountains are earth’s undecaying monuments.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

44. “I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

45. “We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

46. “New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

47. “Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

48. “What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

49. “It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

50. “A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne