Top 500 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

408. “Man’s best-directed effort accomplishes a kind of dream, while God is the sole worker of realities.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “Then, it is true, the prosperity of human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of bygone years.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

413. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

415. “Mindful, however, of her own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender, but strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge. But the task was beyond her skill.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

423. “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

424. “There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature – whatever be the delinquencies of the individual – no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

429. “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

430. “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

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. “The scarlet letter had not done its office.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

433. “I have thought of death,” said she – “have wished for it – would even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for anything.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

435. “They had looked love with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

436. “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

437. “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

438. “A little parallelogram of sky was all that she had hitherto known of nature, so that she felt the awfulness that really exists in its limitless extent.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

442. “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

443. “Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

444. “Life had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along; – and yet it enclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

445. “You, Sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

446. “There is something so massive, stable, and almost irresistibly imposing in the exterior presentment of established rank and great possessions that their very existence seems to give them a right to exist; at least, so excellent a counterfeit of right, that few poor and humble men have moral force enough to question it, even in their secret minds.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

447. “Yes! – these were her realities – all else had vanished!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

448. “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

449. “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

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