Nathaniel Hawthorne > Quotes

“Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Death should take me while I am in the mood.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“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, The Scarlet Letter

“Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“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

“She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.”
― 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

“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“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.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.”
― 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, The Scarlet Letter

“Do anything, save to lie down and die!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rappaccini's Daughter

“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

“To do nothing is the way to be nothing.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Selected Works: The Custom-House, The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, The Marble Faun

“And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“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, The Scarlet Letter

“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother. "We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“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, The Scarlet Letter

“...the sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart...converted it into a tomb...”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so in exorable as one's self!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thoughts alone suffice them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man... to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. 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, The Scarlet Letter

“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, The Scarlet Letter

“No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence...”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“His stories are good to hear at night, because we can dream about them asleep; and good in the morning, too, because then we can dream about them awake. (Cowslip)”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Wonder Book: Heroes and Monsters of Greek Mythology

“She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit. ”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“...happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release...”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the multi-tude.. ... But living in solitude till the fulness of time was come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart..... I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know!...Indeed, we are but shadows—we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream—till the heart be touched. That touch creates us,—then we begin to be,—thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity.
”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another’s actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood, that it was like the first encounter, in the world beyond the grave, of the two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering, in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, more wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost! They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves; because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment. It was with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was the dreariest in the interview. They now felt themselves, at last, inhabitants of the same sphere.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream : it may be so at the moment after death.”
― 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, The Scarlet Letter

“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

“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 to be obeyed.”
― 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

“Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,—call it which you will,—is a book of travels, describing scenes the most unlike that sombre one”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Twice-Told Tales