Famous Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotations

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"We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Life is made up of marble and mud."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Happiness is a butterfly which when pursued is just out of grasp... But if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutified."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"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 true."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"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."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The trees reflected in the river -- they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Ugliness without tact is horrible"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart What jailer so inexorable as one's self"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"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"
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"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."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Yesterday I visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Sunlight is painting."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Generosity is the flower of justice."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"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."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Moonlight is sculpture."
by Nathaniel Hawthorne


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