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Top Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

Browse top 229 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Favorite Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

1. "A forced smile is uglier than a frown." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
2. "She assured them,too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to stablish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
3. "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
4. "Do anything, save to lie down and die!" ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
5. "Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
6. "Ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
7. "The artist glanced at the inflexible image of king, commander, dame, and allegory, that stood around, on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part, partook of the stolid transformation. But in not a single instance did it seem as if the wood were imbibing the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide distinction is here! and how far the slightest portion of the latter merit have outvalued the utmost degree of the former!" ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
8. "In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first; we return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
9. "Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of of deepest sin in the most sacred of quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. "He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
11. "...as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whiter so varied a caravan had preceded him." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
12. "I had neglected to provide myself with books, and as we crept along at the dull rate of four miles per hour, I soon felt the foul fiend Ennui coming upon me" ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
13. "On such a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames, on whatever spot of ground we stood." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
14. "But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport; because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
15. "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
16. "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
17. "God", said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, "God will give him blood to drink!" ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
18. "But there is an influence in the light of the morning that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun's decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
19. "...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
20. "Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. (Wakefield)" ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. "Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
22. "A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
23. "When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring as to possess the character of truth supernaturally revealed." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
24. "Death should take me while I am in the mood." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
25. "Happiness ia like a butterfly which, when pursued ia always beyond our grasp but if you will sit down quietly, may light upon you." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
26. "Next to the lightest heart, the heaviest is apt to be most playful." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
27. "Clifford, except for Phoebe's more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair, till eventide." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
28. "He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies out of them..." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
29. "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
30. "speaks?" ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
31. "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
32. "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
33. "To-morrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
34. "But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
35. "...people always grow more foolish, unless they take care to grow wiser and wiser..." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
36. "Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage.... It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine...." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
37. "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
38. "Clergymen, judges, statesmen--the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day--stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
39. "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
40. "Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
41. "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." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
42. "But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed, from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness [...]" ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
43. "themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience," ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
44. "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
45. "It was a tender and heart-dissolving prayer, full of sorrow, yet so imbued with celestial hopes, that the music of a heavenly harp, swept by the fingers of the dead, seemed faintly to be heard among the saddest accents of the minister." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
46. "The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend. They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say, it seared Hester's bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
47. "Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
48. "...the holiest among us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
49. "Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues, before I could see her as she really was." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
50. "Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living." ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It would, of course, have to look like an accident."
Author: Anne Taintor

What Did Nathaniel Hawthorne Talk About?

Wit
Ear
Here
Con
Self
Thin
Lit
Per
Hen
Able
Thou
End
Ten
Hear
Heart
She
Owe
May
Tan
Act
Hey
Less
Sit
Sin
Era
Old
Son
Use
Hum
King
Light
Bee
Ring
Ally
Pen
Lie
Los
Low
Spirit
Himself
Mad
Read
Sun
Though
Round
Ought
Tie
Woman
Rest
Off

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