Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.

…a flower of strange beauty, growing in a desolate spot, and blossoming in the wind...

God will give him blood to drink!

It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.

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

Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.

The dell was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.

Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!

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.

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

It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home.

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

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

...people always grow more foolish, unless they take care to grow wiser and wiser...

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...