Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2026 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. “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

453. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

456. “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

457. “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

458. “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

459. “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

460. “When men seek only to be trampled upon, it were a pity to deny them a favor so easily granted – and so well deserved!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

461. “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

462. “There he dwelt among poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good people, Irish, and whomsoever else were neediest.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

463. “The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

464. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

466. “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

467. “On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

468. “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

469. “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

470. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

474. “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

475. “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

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

489. “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

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. “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

493. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

499. “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

500. “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