Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the various properties of her inner life.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

452. “It was one of those moments – which sometimes occur only at the interval of years – when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his minds age.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

453. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

461. “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

462. “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

463. “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

464. “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

465. “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

466. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

469. “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

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

474. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

480. “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

481. “The preposterous obstinacy of these honest people in persisting to groan and stumble along the difficult pathway rather than take advantage of modern improvements, excited great mirth among our wiser brotherhood.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

482. “Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

483. “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

484. “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

485. “The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadow scope of time, and, living once for all eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

486. “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

487. “And wise Uncle Venner, passing slowly from the ruinous porch, seemed to hear a strain of music, and fancied that sweet Alice Pyncheon-after witnessing these deeds, this bygone woe and this present happiness, of her kindred mortals-had given one farewell touch of a spirit’s joy upon her harpsichord, as she floated heavenward from the House of the Seven Gables.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

490. “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

491. “It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror, even while he fancied her spirit to be imbued with the same baneful essence that seemed to pervade her physical frame; but a wild offspring of both love and horror that had each parent in it, and burned like one and shivered like the other.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

492. “Therefore, if we built splendid castles, and pictured beautiful scenes, among the fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all went to rack with the crumbling embers, and have never since arisen out of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame. 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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

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. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

499. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne