Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

453. “At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of just about Holgrave’s age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, even after mucha nd careful inquiry, we never happen to hear another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

455. “The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, – stern and wild ones, – and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

456. “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

457. “Mindful, however, of her own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender, but strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge. But the task was beyond her skill.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “It must suffice, that, though my form be absent, my inner man goes constantly to church, while many, whose bodily presence fills the accustomed seats, have left their souls at home.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

464. “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

465. “They had looked love with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

466. “The sympathies of these two men instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained alone. Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful music which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor distinguished his own share from the other’s. They led one another, as it were, into a high pavilion of their thoughts, so remote, and hitherto so dim, that they had never entered it before, and so beautiful that they desired to be there always.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

467. “A little parallelogram of sky was all that she had hitherto known of nature, so that she felt the awfulness that really exists in its limitless extent.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

468. “Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are conscious of a social warmth from each other’s presence and contiguity. They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

470. “The devoted sister had solemn thoughts of thrumming on its chords for Clifford’s benefit, and accompanying the performance with her voice. Poor Clifford! Poor Hepzibah! Poor harpsichord!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

471. “There was a sense within her, – too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind, – that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one plant that gave it unity.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

472. “Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society;.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

473. “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

474. “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

475. “More than once, he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

476. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

478. “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

479. “Air that had not been breathed once and again! air that had not been spoken into words of falsehood, formality, and error, like all the air of the dusky city!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

480. “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

481. “She seeks to place herself above the sympathies of our common nature, which envelopes all human souls. See if that nature do not assert its claim over her in some mode that shall bring her level with the lowest!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

482. “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

483. “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

484. “I have no heavenly father.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

485. “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

486. “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

487. “He was too calm and cool an observer. Phoebe felt his eye, often; his heart, seldom or never.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

489. “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

490. “Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life! – that have made thee feeble to will and to do! – that will leave thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

492. “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

493. “The minister felt for the child’s other hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own, pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

498. “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

499. “It would break her dear little heart; and I’d rather break my own!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

500. “Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne