Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “At the other end... was provided a deep and cushioned seat. Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre-table, to be turned over by the casual guest.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

452. “There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

453. “Yes! – these were her realities – all else had vanished!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

454. “No longer ago than this morning, I was old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow’s feet about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no right to come! I had not lived!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

455. “They are unavoidable at this moment, standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as unreal as the giants and ogres of a child’s story-book. I find nothing so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it. So it will be with what you think so terrible.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

456. “Men of uncommon intellect who have grown morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they throw the life of many days and then are lifeless for as many more.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

457. “I said, but now, that there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling, at every step, over the guilt wherewith we have strewn our path.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

458. “After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind is spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

459. “It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

460. “A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments...”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

461. “She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

462. “If it be a sign of mourning,” replied Mr. Hooper, “I, perhaps, like most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by a black veil.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

463. “Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

464. “It seemed to me – the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word – it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

465. “Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep her heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready to defend them to the death.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

466. “The experiment, so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

467. “Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent in thinking of it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

468. “At last, after creeping as it were, for such a length of time along the utmost verge of the opaque puddle of obscurity, they had taken that downright plunge, which, sooner or later, is the destiny of all families, whether princely or plebian.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

469. “A trait si-a iubit si asta face si acum! In trandafirul asta de-o frumusete perfecta nu mai e nici o petala nedeschisa, nici o picatura de roua pe care n-au vazut-o razele soarelui.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

470. “Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

471. “She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

472. “They stopped on the bridge to look into the swift eddying flow of the yellow Tiber, a mud puddle in strenuous motion;.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

473. “It depresses me to look at old frescos,” responded the Count; “it is a pain, yet not enough of a pain to answer as a penance.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

474. “Her simple, careless, childish flow of spirits often made me sad. She seemed to me like a butterfly at play in a flickering bit of sunshine, and mistaking it for broad and eternal summer. We sometimes hold mirth to stricter accountability than sorrow; it must show good cause, or the echo of its laughter comes back drearily.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

475. “Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

476. “Life had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along; – and yet it enclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

477. “You, Sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

478. “But, to tell you my private mind, Signor Giovanni, he should receive little credit for such instances of success – they being probably the work of chance – but should be held strictly accountable for his failures, which may justly be considered his own work.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

479. “It is odd enough that the kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life – the life of degenerated mortals – from the life of Paradise. Eve had no dinner-pot, and no clothes to mend, and no washing-day.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

480. “Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

481. “In my own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world’s improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

482. “She said that it had always been thus with Clifford when the humming-birds came, -always, from his babyhood,-and that his delight in them had been one of the earliest tokens by which he showed his love for beautiful things.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

483. “Imagination, by casting certain circumstances judicially into the shade, may see much to admire.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

484. “But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest-trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

485. “Writers of society, whose new works glow like the rich texture of a just-woven carpet, must be content to relinquish their charm, for every reader, after an age or two.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

486. “It was sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks, and months, and years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this forgotten corner never more to be glanced at by human eyes.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

487. “A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

488. “The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from Hollingsworth’s character and errors, is simply this, that, admitting what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to the individual whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes. It.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

489. “Bigotry; self-conceit; an insolent curiosity; a meddlesome temper; a cold-blooded criticism, founded on a shallow interpretation of half-perceptions; a monstrous scepticism in regard to any conscience or any wisdom, except one’s own; a most irreverent propensity to thrust Providence aside, and substitute one’s self in its awful place, – out of these, and other motives as miserable as these, comes your idea of duty!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

490. “I have no heavenly father.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

491. “Tell him he has murdered me! Tell him that I’ll haunt him!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

492. “Thus the world assumed another and a better aspect from the hour that the poet blessed it with his happy eyes. The Creator had bestowed him, as the last best touch to his own handiwork. Creation was not finished till the poet came to interpret, and so complete it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

493. “Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

494. “Your fantastic anticipations make me discern all the more forcibly what a wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we have wasted a precious summer of our lives. Do you seriously imagine that any such realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of, will ever be brought to pass?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

495. “Burlacul se simte-ntotdeauna tras pe sfoara cand stie, sau banuieste, ca vreuna din femeile pe care le cunoaste s-a deconspirat singura.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

496. “Heaven would show mercy,” rejoined Hester, “hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

497. “Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting, even to the happiest among them?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

498. “But I never considered it as other than a transitory life.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

499. “Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may die other human souls!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

500. “To this last apothegm poor Hepzibah responded with a sigh so deep and heavy that it almost rustled Uncle Venner quite away, like a withered leaf, – as he was, – before an autumnal gale. Recovering himself, however, he bent forward, and, with a good deal of feeling in his ancient visage, beckoned her nearer to him.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne