Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
Women are safer in perilous situations and emergencies than men, and might be still more so if they trusted themselves more confidingly to the chivalry of manhood.
When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived.
Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.
Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.
Or-but this more rarely happened-she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it.
There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.
Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster-and thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster--without man, as her acknowledged principal!
I love my mother, but there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between people of strong feelings.
The traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude.
Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.
She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.
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.
How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!
What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale!
My wife is - in the strictest sense - my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart.
Writing can come naturally to some. Still, when it comes to good writing, this is true: Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.
In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.
Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.
We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point.
There is no greater bugbear than a strong willed relative in the circle of his own connections.
What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart.
If we would know what heaven is before we come thither, let us retire into the depths of our own spirits, and we shall find it there among holy thoughts and feelings.
Never was there a dingier, uglier, less picturesque city than London ... it is really wonderful that so much brick and stone, for centuries together, should have been built up with so poor a result.
This greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things-from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, "This, too, will pass away.
It is because the spirit is inestimable, that the lifeless body is so little valued.
As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.
My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream.
The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death.
Nervous and excitable persons need to talk a great deal, by way of letting off their steam.
It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money.
This dull river has a deep religion of its own; so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously.
London is like the grave in one respect -- any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London.
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)
A human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House.
Those with whom we can apparently become well acquainted in a few moments are generally the most difficult to rightly know and to understand.
The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!
If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
The love of science to rival the love of woman, in its depth and absorbing energy.
What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?
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.