Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

105. “The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

106. “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

107. “Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

108. “She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next...”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

109. “When scattered clouds are resting on the bosoms of hills, it seems as if one might climb into the heavenly region, earth being so intermixed with sky, and gradually transformed into it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

110. “The law we broke! – the sin here so awfully revealed! – let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our God, – when we violated our reverence each for the other’s soul, – it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

111. “On Andrew Jackson: “His native strength compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him a sharper tool.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

112. “A man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

113. “Every crime destroys more Edens than our own.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

114. “A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

115. “Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

116. “The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

117. “The love of science to rival the love of woman, in its depth and absorbing energy.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

118. “Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister’s miserable experience, we put only this into sentence: Be True! Be True! Be True! Show freely to the world if not the worst, yet some trait whereby the worst can be inferred.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

119. “Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

120. “Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

121. “Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

122. “All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

123. “Pleasant is a rainy winter’s day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement, – call it which you will, – is a book of travels, describing scenes the most unlike that sombre one.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

124. “As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

125. “But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

126. “A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

127. “Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster-and thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster – without man, as her acknowledged principal!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

128. “To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

129. “There is no such thing in man’s nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

130. “Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

131. “Just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God’s care and pity for every separate need.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

132. “We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

133. “All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman’s love and kept him in that saddest of all prisons his own heart;.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

134. “All human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

135. “Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

136. “A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

137. “But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

138. “Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

139. “Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs... Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

140. “Technologies of easy travel give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man’s inducement to tarry in one spot?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

141. “O Father in Heaven – if Thou art still my Father – what is this being which I have brought into the world?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

142. “The inward pleasure of imparting pleasure – that is the choicest of all.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

143. “The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is mossgrown, and good Mr. Hooper’s face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it mouldered beneath the black veil.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

144. “All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

145. “She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

146. “The days of the far off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up and bear along with her but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

147. “Unquestionably we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world; and I myself have felt the heart-throb at sight of it, as sensibly as other men.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

148. “I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

149. “In the little chaos of Pearl’s character there might be seen emerging-and could have been from the very first-the steadfast principles of an unflinching courage-an uncontrollable will-a sturdy pride which might be disciplined into self-respect-and a bitter scorn of many things, which, when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

150. “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne