Nathaniel Hawthorne quotes

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. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Easy reading is damned hard writing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Life is made up of marble and mud.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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. (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.
Nathaniel Hawthorne