33 Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
- 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.
- The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.
- Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.
- Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
- Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
- Sunlight is painting.
- Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.
- The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
- The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
- Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.
- We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
- Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
- What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
- Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
- You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.
- Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.
- We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
- No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
- A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.
- A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon.
- A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.
- Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
- Easy reading is damn hard writing.
- A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
- In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.
- 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.
- Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.
- Moonlight is sculpture.
- Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.
- Success is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it eludes you. But if you stand still, it may just alight upon your shoulder.
- Success is like a butterfly; chase it, and it will elude you. But if you sit quietly, it may alight upon you.
- Success is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the harder it becomes to catch. But if you stand still, it may just alight upon you!
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