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Nathaniel Hawthorne quotes - page 7
Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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
But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had mediated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Some maladies are rich and precious and only to be Acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
To-morrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility. from The Scarlet Letter.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
See those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth Then recognize your Shame.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State --neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Man's own youth is the world's youth at least he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Yesterday I visited the British Museum an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a love-born of Gods care for every need.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden ... It is sad that nature will play such tricks with us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, tricking us to the heart.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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 mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Work is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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