Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer. Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism.

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A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream, it may be so the moment after death.

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

A stale article if you dip it in a good warm sunny smile will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon.

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

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.

Caresses expressions of one sort or another are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained love will die at the roots.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

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.

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.

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

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

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

Sunlight is painting.

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.

Time flies over us but leaves it shadow behind.

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.

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.

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

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.

Moonlight is sculpture.

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself who care little for his pursuits and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

Love whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber must always create sunshine filling the heart so full of radiance this it overflows upon the outward world.

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.

A woman's chastity consists like an onion of a series of coats.

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

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

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.

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.

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