Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

202. “Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

203. “Men of cold passions have quick eyes.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

204. “Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

205. “But this very burden it was, that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes terrible! The people knew not the power that.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

206. “Or-but this more rarely happened-she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

207. “When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

208. “Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House opens on the road to Paradise.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

209. “We sometimes congratulate ourselves...”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

210. “It is my opinion that a man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

211. “Unless people are more than commonly disagreeable, it is my foolish habit to contract a kindness for them.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

212. “Faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows – standing without, you can see no glory, nor can imagine any, but standing within every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

213. “Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

214. “There is no greater bugbear than a strong willed relative in the circle of his own connections.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

215. “It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

216. “The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

217. “The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

218. “Dream strange things and make them look like truth.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

219. “Oh, how stubbornly does love, – or even that cunning semblance of love which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into the heart, – how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

220. “Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

221. “How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

222. “Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before her eyes. With these she decorated her hair and her young waist, and became a nymph child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with the antique wood.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

223. “Let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious to follow out one’s day-dream to its natural consummation, although if the vision has been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

224. “What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

225. “Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

226. “Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity. The.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

227. “Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beautiful results – the fragrance of celestial flowers – to the daily life of others.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

228. “It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another’s actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

229. “London is like the grave in one respect – any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

230. “The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

231. “Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

232. “Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom’s Day.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

233. “The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

234. “I love my mother, but there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between people of strong feelings.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

235. “I sometimes fancy,” said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene always made a strong impression, “that Rome – mere Rome – will crowd everything else out of my heart.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

236. “The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

237. “In short, there has seldom been seen so depressed and sad a figure as this young girl’s; and it was hardly possible to help being angry with her, from mere despair of doing anything for her comfort.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

238. “Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

239. “Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

240. “The shame lay in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

241. “Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

242. “Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

243. “We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

244. “What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

245. “Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

246. “I have come to see the nonsense of trying to describe fine scenery.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

247. “This above all: be true, be true, be true.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

248. “The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

249. “Salt is white and pure – there is something holy in salt.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

250. “Women are safer in perilous situations and emergencies than men, and might be still more so if they trusted themselves more confidingly to the chivalry of manhood.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne