Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

355. “Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay, than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

356. “A vast deal of human sympathy runs along the electric line of needlework, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humble seamstress.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

357. “The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

358. “The besetting sin of a philanthropist, it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity. His sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men. At some point of his course – I know not exactly when or where – he is tempted to palter with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside his private conscience.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

382. “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

383. “I will not speak!” answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. “And my child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an earthly one!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

384. “It was like the heavy mass of clouds, which we may often see obscuring the sky, and making a gray twilight everywhere, until, towards nightfall, it yields temporarily to a glimpse of sunshine. But, always, the envious cloud strives to gather again across the streak of celestial azure.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

385. “In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

386. “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

387. “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

388. “Unknown to all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock and key of her silence, he chose to withdraw his name from the roll of mankind, and, as regarded his former ties and interests, to vanish out of life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean, whither rumor had long ago consigned him.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

389. “He had spoken the very truth and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, eh loathed his miserable self.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

394. “It is as clear to me as sunshine–were there any in the sky–that the greatest possible stumbling-blocks in the path of human happiness and improvement, are these heaps of bricks, and stones, consolidated with mortar, or hewn timber, fastened together with spike-nails, which men painfully contrive for their own torment, and call them house and home! The soul needs air; a wide sweep and frequent change of it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

395. “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

396. “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

397. “La razza umana, come ogni altro seme, non prospera rigogliosa, se trapiantata nello stesso terreno troppo a lungo sfruttato.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

398. “In giving her existence, a great law had been broken; and the result was a being, whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder; or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

399. “They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those self-condemning words.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

400. “It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne