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Nathaniel Hawthorne

103 quotes

“If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In view of my previous weariness of office, and vague thoughts of resignation, 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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She named the minister; and the moment she did so, all the reserve melted away, and burst into tears. Not, however, that the sight of him was any new sensation. He had long been in her eyes, a necessity; and she had habitually overflowed with awe, to him in the pulpit, and to do him reverence the dread being had vanished.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straitly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let the black flower blossom as it may!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its own.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers — stern and wild ones, — and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: — "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 (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Halfway down a by-street of one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house, with seven acutely peaked gables, facing towards various points of the compass, and a huge, clustered chimney in the midst. The street is Pyncheon Street; the house is the old Pyncheon House; and an elm-tree, of wide circumference, rooted before the door, is familiar to every town-born child by the title of the Pyncheon Elm.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within. Were these to be worthily recounted, they would form a narrative of no small interest and instruction, and possessing, moreover, a certain remarkable unity, which might almost seem the result of artistic arrangement.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“God will give him blood to drink!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life is made up of marble and mud.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one — none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance — to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I seriously wished—selfish as it may appear—that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance writers may find congenial and easily handled themes, either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is a suggestive idea to track those worn feet backward through all the paths they have trodden ever since they were the tender and rosy little feet of a baby, and (cold as they now are) were kept warm in his mother's hand.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate the Holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment, good in itself, is not good to do religiously.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any; standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we have once known Rome, and left her […], we are astonished by the discovery, by-and-by, that our heartstrings have mysteriously attached themselves to the Eternal City, and are drawing us thitherward again, as if it were more familiar, more ultimately our home, than even the spot where we were born.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In old times, the settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the northern Indians, coming down upon them from this mountain rampart, through some defile known only to themselves. It is indeed a wondrous path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was travelling up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand directly across his intended road. He tarries not for such an obstacle, but rending it asunder, a thousand feet from peak to base, discloses its treasures of hidden minerals, its sunless waters, all the secrets of the mountain's inmost heart, with a mighty fracture of rugged precipices on each side. This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me, that I have attempted to describe it by so mean an image — feeling, as I do, that it is one of those symbolic scenes, which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not to the conception, of Omnipotence.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) first seen 1835 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sketches from Memory": The Notch of the White Mountains (1835)
“Somewhat of a babbler, indeed, did people begin to think him; for he was apt to discourse at wearisome length of marvels of mechanism that he had read about... Among them he enumerated the Man of Brass, constructed by Albertus Magnus, and the Brazen Head of Friar Bacon... the automata of a little coach and horses, which it was pretended had been manufactured for the Dauphin of France; together with an insect that buzzed about the ear like a living fly... a duck that waddled, and quacked, and ate... In his idle and dreamy days he had considered it possible... to spiritualize machinery... a beauty that should attain to the ideal which Nature proposed to herself in all her creatures...”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Can the philosopher, big with the inspiration of an idea that is to reform mankind, believe that he is to be beckoned from this sensible existence at the very instant when he is mustering his breath to speak the word of light? Should he perish so, the weary ages must pass away—the world's, whose life sand may fall, drop by drop—before another intellect is prepared to develop the truth that might have been uttered then. But history affords many an example where the most precious spirit... has gone hence... The prophet dies, and the man of torpid heart and sluggish brain lives on. The poet leaves his song half sung, or finishes it, beyond the scope of mortal ears... The painter—as Allston did—leaves half his conception on the canvas to sadden us with its imperfect beauty, and goes to picture forth the whole... in the hues of heaven. But rather such incomplete designs of life will be perfected nowhere. This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects must be taken as proof that the deeds of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are without value, except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As if the butterfly, like the artist, were conscious of something not entirely congenial in the child's nature, it alternately sparkled and grew dim. At length it arose from the small hand of the infant with an airy motion that seemed to bear it upward without an effort, as if the ethereal instincts with which its master's spirit had endowed it impelled this fair vision involuntarily to a higher sphere. Had there been no obstruction, it might have soared into the sky and grown immortal. But its lustre gleamed upon the ceiling; the exquisite texture of its wings brushed against that earthly medium; and a sparkle or two, as of stardust, floated downward and lay glimmering on the carpet.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these thoughts, Ethan Brand rose from the log, and flung open the door of the kiln. The action was in such accordance with the idea in Bertram's mind, that he almost expected to see the Evil One issue forth, red-hot, from the raging furnace. Hold! hold!" cried he, with a tremulous attempt to laugh; for he was ashamed of his fears, although they overmastered him. "Don't, for mercy's sake, bring out your Devil now!" "Man!" sternly replied Ethan Brand, "what need have I of the Devil? I have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such half-way sinners as you that he busies himself. Fear not, because I open the door. I do but act by old custom, and am going to trim your fire, like a lime-burner, as I was once." He stirred the vast coals, thrust in more wood, and bent forward to gaze into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless of the fierce glow that reddened his face. The lime-burner sat watching him, and half suspected this strange guest of a purpose, if not to evoke a fiend, at least to plunge into the flames, and thus vanish from the sight of man. Ethan Brand, however, drew quietly back, and closed the door of the kiln. "I have looked," said he, "into many a human heart that was seven times hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace is with fire. But I found not there what I sought. No, not the Unpardonable Sin!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed steadily into his face. "They tell me you have been all over the earth," said he, wringing his hands with earnestness. "You must have seen my daughter, for she makes a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?" Ethan Brand's eye quailed beneath the old man's. That daughter, from whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose, Ethan Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,—how the dark forest had whispered to him,—how the stars had gleamed upon him,—a simple and loving man, watching his fire in the years gone by, and ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held as sacred to a brother; with what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then ensued the base intellectual development which, in its progress, disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its surface, in the midst of the circle,—snow-white too, and thoroughly converted into lime,—lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a person who, after long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the ribs—strange to say—was the shape of a human heart. "Was the fellow's heart made of marble?" cried Bertram... "At any rate, it is burnt into what looks like a special good lime... my kiln is half a bushel the richer for him." ... [T]he rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and, letting it fall upon the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crumbled into fragments.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) said by 1864 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source