The Blithedale Romance Quotes

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

“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

“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 Blithedale Romance

“I sometimes fancy," said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene always made a strong impression, "that Rome--mere Rome--will crowd everything else out of my heart.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“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

“For, has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after a certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put ourselves to death in whole-hearted simplicity?”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“Or this:—that the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breadth out of the beaten track.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“Let us choose the rudest, roughest, most uncultivable spot, for Death's garden ground; and Death shall teach us to beautify it, grave by grave.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“I rejoice that I could once think better of the world's improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice, in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can magnanimously persist in error.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly strait path. They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to suspect—so cunning has the Devil been with them—that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance [with Biographical Introduction]

“At the crisis of my fever, I besought Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but continually to make me sensible of his own presence… then he should be the witness how courageously I would encounter the worst. It still impresses me almost a matter of regret, that I did not die then, when I had tolerably made up my mind to do it”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“The besetting sin of a philanthropist, it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity. His sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men. At some point of his course—I know not exactly when or where—he is tempted to palter with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside his private conscience.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“In short, there has seldom been seen so depressed and sad a figure as this young girl's; and it was hardly possible to help being angry with her, from mere despair of doing anything for her comfort.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“How can she be happy, after discovering that fate has assigned her but one single event, which she must contrive to make the substance of her whole life?”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“my past life has been a tiresome one enough; yet I would rather look backward ten times, than forward once. For, little as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for one thing, that the good we aim at will not be attained. People never do get just the good they seek. If it come at all, it is something else, which they never dreamed of, and did not particularly want.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“IT IS not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or, if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all—though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage-may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“But real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“worldly society at large, where a cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“that I suddenly found myself possessed by a mood of disbelief in moral beauty or heroism, and a conviction of the folly of attempting to benefit the world. Our especial scheme of reform, which, from my observatory, I could take in with the bodily eye, looked so ridiculous that it was impossible not to laugh aloud.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“unless there be real affection in his heart, a man cannot,—such is the bad state to which the world has brought itself,—cannot more effectually show his contempt for a brother mortal, nor more gallingly assume a position of superiority, than by addressing him as "friend.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“A man—poet, prophet, or whatever he may be—readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and of course patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,—though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage,—may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“the terrible egotism which he mistook for an angel of God.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“Were I to describe the perfect horror of the spectacle, the reader might justly reckon it to me for a sin and shame. For more than twelve long years I have borne it in my memory, and could now reproduce it as freshly as if it were still before my eyes. Of all modes of death, methinks it is the ugliest. Her wet garments swathed limbs of terrible inflexibility. She was the marble image of a death-agony. Her arms had grown rigid in the act of struggling, and were bent before her with clenched hands; her knees, too, were bent, and—thank God for it!—in the attitude of prayer. Ah, that rigidity! It is impossible to bear the terror of it. It seemed,—I must needs impart so much of my own miserable idea,—it seemed as if her body must keep the same position in the coffin, and that her skeleton would keep it in the grave; and that when Zenobia rose at the day of judgment, it would be in just the same attitude as now! One hope I had, and that too was mingled half with fear. She knelt as if in prayer.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“The clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar—the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity—are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“It is not, I apprehend, a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women. If the person under examination be one’s self, the result is pretty certain to be diseased action of the heart, almost before we can snatch a second glance. Or, if we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster, which, after all,--though we can point to every feature of his deformity in the real personage,--may be said to have been created mainly by ourselves.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

“Therefore, if we built splendid castles, and pictured beautiful scenes, among the fervid coals of the hearth around which we were clustering, and if all went to rack with the crumbling embers, and have never since arisen out of the ashes, let us take to ourselves no shame. In my own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world’s improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance