Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Death should take me while I am in the mood.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

53. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

56. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

60. “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

61. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

67. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

69. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

72. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

77. “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

78. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

81. “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

82. “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

83. “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

84. “New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

93. “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

94. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

96. “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

97. “That old woman taught me my catechism!” said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

98. “Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

99. “Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

100. “If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne