Minhaj Ali > Minhaj's 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

“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

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

“She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”
― 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

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

“She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.”
― 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

“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

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

“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 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

“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

“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

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

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

“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

“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so in exorable as one's self!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about.”
― 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.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

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

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

“It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables

“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

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

“A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne