Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “It is but for a moment, comparatively, that anything looks strange or startling – a truth that has the bitter and the sweet in it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

352. “One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

353. “It was not painful to behold this look; for, though dim, it had not the imbecility of decaying age.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

354. “It is a comfortable thought, that the smallest and most turbid mud-puddle can contain its own picture of Heaven.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

355. “To be left alone in the wide world with scarcely a friend, – this makes the sadness which, striking its pang into the minds of the young and the affectionate, teaches them too soon to watch and interpret the spirit-signs of their own hearts.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

356. “Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth, the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator...”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

357. “Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild hallucination.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

358. “He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

359. “I shall do better amongst other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do just as well without me.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

360. “So they lingered an instant longer. No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here, seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one moment, true!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

361. “I felt as if it were better, or not worse, to have compressed my enjoyments and sufferings into a few wild years, and then to rest myself in an early grave, than to have chosen the untroubled and ungladdened course of the crowd before me, whose days were all alike, and a long lifetime like each day.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

362. “An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

363. “Go, Annie,” murmured he; “I have deceived myself, and must suffer for it. I yearned for sympathy, and thought, and fancied, and dreamed that you might give it me; but you lack the talisman, Annie, that should admit you into my secrets.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

364. “It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts...”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

365. “What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

366. “There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end; but the progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found the way to rectify.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

367. “In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and, with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her towns-people and neighbors.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

368. “Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though unloved, and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

369. “The holy and generous wish, that rises like incense from a pure heart towards heaven, often lavishes its sweet perfume on the blast of evil times.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

370. “L’amore, sia quando nasce, sia quando risorge da un letargo che era sembrato mortale, sprigiona tanta luce che tutto il mondo d’intorno se ne accende.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

371. “The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

372. “By thy first step awry thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since that moment, it has all been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend’s office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

373. “Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

374. “I’m as provocative of tears as an onion!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

375. “It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life. The mother herself – as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed its form – had carefully wrought out the similitude, lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy between the object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

376. “She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering light, that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

377. “Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

378. “This morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong, beneath.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

379. “The truth is, however, that the laboring oar was with our unpolished companions; it being far easier to condescend than to accept of condescension.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

380. “Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast – at her, the child of honorable parents – at her, who had once been innocent – as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

381. “Lo! there ye stand, my children,” said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad, with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. “Depending upon one another’s hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream! Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

382. “First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to the multitude, – that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

383. “She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

384. “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

385. “In no state of society would he have been what is called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within its iron framework.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

386. “There are few things, – whether in the outward world, or to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought, – few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

387. “All such professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the general sentiment which give law its vitality.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

388. “Not a stitch in that embroidered letter, but she has felt it in her heart.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

389. “The links that united her to the rest of human kind – links of flowers, or silk or gold – had all been broken.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

390. “The world’s law was no law for her mind.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

391. “Providence, in the person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester’s charge the germ and blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

392. “At the other end... was provided a deep and cushioned seat. Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre-table, to be turned over by the casual guest.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

393. “These names of gentleman and lady had a meaning, in the past history of the world, and conferred privileges, desirable, or otherwise, on those entitled to bear them. In the present – and still more in the future condition of society – they imply, not privilege, but restriction.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

394. “Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

395. “The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

396. “Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their eminent position imposed the guardianship of the public morals.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

397. “Love must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance that it overflows upon the outward world.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

398. “Donatello, you had better take one of those gay, boyish artists for your companion,” said Miriam, when she found the Italian youth at her side.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

399. “Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

400. “This child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame hath come from the hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so earnestly, and with such bitterness of spirit, the right to keep her. It was meant for a blessing; for the one blessing of her life!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne