Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

52. “Death should take me while I am in the mood.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

53. “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

54. “I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

55. “What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

56. “Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

57. “Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

58. “I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

59. “Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

60. “A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

61. “The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may going to prove one’s self a fool.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

62. “Human beings owe a debt of love to one another because there is no other method of paying the debt of love and care which all of us owe to providence.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

63. “A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

64. “But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had mediated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

65. “She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith, therefore, that its result would be for good.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

66. “It loves more readily than it hates.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

67. “This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

68. “On the threshold she paused... for perchance the idea of entering, all alone, and all so changed, the home of so intense a former life was more dreary and desolate than even she could bear.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

69. “Let the attempt be made, at whatever risk.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

70. “Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

71. “Let the black flower blossom as it may!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

72. “Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

73. “Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

74. “A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

75. “The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

76. “But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

77. “When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

78. “She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

79. “It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thoughts alone suffice them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

80. “There is an alchemy of quiet malice by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

81. “Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

82. “The trees reflected in the river – they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

83. “She wanted – what some people want throughout life – a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

84. “Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

85. “Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true that, to a sensitive observer, there was some thing exquisitely painful in it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

86. “What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb’s bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

87. “When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of the reality.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

88. “Is it a fact-or have I dreamt it-that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

89. “I heard a neigh. Oh, such a brisk and melodious neigh it was. My very heart leapt with the sound.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

90. “When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

91. “We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

92. “We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

93. “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? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

94. “It is a little remarkable, that – though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends – an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

95. “She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

96. “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.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

97. “The subject had reference to secret sin and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

98. “In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

99. “What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

100. “Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne