"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

"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)

"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

"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

"Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living."
— 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."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"Do anything, save to lie down and die!"
— 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)

"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

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"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)

"...the sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart...converted it into a tomb..."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"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)

"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

"Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful doorway in the hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim's face."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"The child probably overheard their voices; for, looking up to the window, with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrunk, with nervous dread, from the light missile."
— 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

"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)

"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

"The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. [Speaking of self-posed isolation in old age.]"
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"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)

"To do nothing is the way to be nothing."
— 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)

"A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The House of the Seven Gables)

""America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women""
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Be it sin or no, I hate the man!"
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"...daily receiving the old physician in his study; or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation's sake, watching the processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"But what could be the purpose of the unseasonable toil, which was again resumed, as the watchman knew by the lines of lamp-light through the crevices of Owen Warland's shutters? The townspeople had one comprehensive explanation of all these singularities. Owen Warland had gone mad! How universally efficacious--how satisfactory, too, and soothing to the injured sensibility of narrowness and dullness--is this easy method of accounting for whatever lies beyond the world's most ordinary scope!

- "The Artist of the Beautiful"
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (Tales and Sketches (A Book of Autographs, Browne's Folly, Doctor Bullivant, The Journal of the Solit)

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

"Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into sentence: Be True! Be True! Be True! Show freely to the world if not the worst, yet some trait whereby the worst can be inferred."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance that it overflows upon the outward soul."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"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)

"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)

"A pure hand needs no glove to cover it."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne

"...the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction."
— 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

"...Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter)

"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. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow."
— Nathaniel Hawthorne