Nathaniel Hawthorne's Quotes

Moonlight is sculpture.

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.

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

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.

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.

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 it be obeyed.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.

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.

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.

All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.

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.

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.

Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

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.

Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.