Top 15 Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

A single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities.

We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

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.

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.

"I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house."

[Notebook, Oct. 10, 1842]

Death should take me while I am in the mood.

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.

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.

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.

She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief.

Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!