Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “It was carelessly at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

407. “Whatever else I may repent of, therefore, let it be reckoned neither among my sins nor follies that I once had faith and force enough to form generous hopes of the world’s destiny – yes! – and to do what in me lay for their accomplishment;.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

409. “It was one of those moments – which sometimes occur only at the interval of years – when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his minds age.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

410. “But I am weary of this place, and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery in our effort to establish the one true system. I.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

411. “To the untrue man, the whole universe is false.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

412. “Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled. “But thy words interpret thee as a terror!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

413. “On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

414. “The experiment, so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

415. “The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

416. “She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

417. “Her simple, careless, childish flow of spirits often made me sad. She seemed to me like a butterfly at play in a flickering bit of sunshine, and mistaking it for broad and eternal summer. We sometimes hold mirth to stricter accountability than sorrow; it must show good cause, or the echo of its laughter comes back drearily.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

418. “At almost every step in life, we meet with young men of just about Holgrave’s age, for whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, even after mucha nd careful inquiry, we never happen to hear another word. The effervescence of youth and passion, and the fresh gloss of the intellect and imagination, endow them with a false brilliancy, which makes fools of themselves and other people.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

419. “Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it! Begin all new!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

420. “It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

421. “The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. 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

422. “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

423. “Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

424. “In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creatures.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

425. “They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

427. “In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

428. “It seemed to me – the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word – it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

429. “Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep her heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready to defend them to the death.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

430. “In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

431. “Miserable!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What mean you, foolish girl? Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvellous gifts against which no power nor strength could avail an enemy – misery, to be able to quell the mightiest with a breath – misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none?”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

432. “No longer ago than this morning, I was old. I remember looking in the glass, and wondering at my own gray hair, and the wrinkles, many and deep, right across my brow, and the furrows down my cheeks, and the prodigious trampling of crow’s feet about my temples! It was too soon! I could not bear it! Age had no right to come! I had not lived!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

433. “It must suffice, that, though my form be absent, my inner man goes constantly to church, while many, whose bodily presence fills the accustomed seats, have left their souls at home.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

434. “They are unavoidable at this moment, standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as unreal as the giants and ogres of a child’s story-book. I find nothing so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it. So it will be with what you think so terrible.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

435. “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. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

436. “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

437. “They are practised politicians, every man of them, and skilled to adjust those preliminary measures, which steal from the people, without its knowledge, the power of choosing its own rulers.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

438. “Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness;.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

439. “The truth seems to be, however, that, when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him, better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

440. “They stopped on the bridge to look into the swift eddying flow of the yellow Tiber, a mud puddle in strenuous motion;.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

441. “I begin to suspect that the man’s bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

442. “She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

443. “It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections; not that they gape so long and wide – but so quickly close again!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

444. “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

445. “If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or – and the outward semblance is the same – crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

446. “The moral which presents itself to my reflections, as drawn from Hollingsworth’s character and errors, is simply this, that, admitting what is called philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to the individual whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes. It.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

447. “There he dwelt among poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good people, Irish, and whomsoever else were neediest.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

448. “Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life! – that have made thee feeble to will and to do! – that will leave thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

449. “Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

450. “Little Pearl, Hester’s young child, fulminates with unconscious aggression in the wild tantrums that, Hawthorne says, reflect the illicit desire with which she was conceived.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne