Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

Or this: — that the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breadth out of the beaten track.

I'm as provocative of tears as an onion!

Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.

He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots. Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her brother and herself was changed.

The struggle, if it were one, need not be described.

To persons whose pursuits are insulated from the common business of life—who are either in advance of mankind or apart from it—there often comes a sensation of moral cold that makes the spirit shiver as if it had reached the frozen solitudes around the pole. What the prophet, the poet, the reformer, the criminal, or any other man with human yearnings, but separated from the multitude by a peculiar lot, might feel, poor Owen felt.

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.

... for when a man's spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offenses, but never resentful of great ones.

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.

Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them.

But is it alive?" exclaimed she again; and the finger on which the gorgeous mystery had alighted was so tremulous that the butterfly was forced to balance himself with his wings. "Tell me if it be alive, or whether you created it. But"—and here his countenance somewhat changed—"this butterfly is not now to me what it was when I beheld it afar off in a daydream of my youth.

Growing as they did, however, out of the old earth, the flowers still sent a fresh and sweet incense up to their Creator...

But year after year that summons, unheard but felt, was disobeyed. His one secret thought became like a chain binding down his spirit and like a serpent gnawing into his heart.

What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?

...such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin.