It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The… - Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thoughts alone suffice them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (4 July 1804 – 19 May 1864) was an American writer remembered for his romance novels (The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, The Blithedale Romance, and The Marble Faun) and short stories.
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Mathew Benjamin Brady (Public domain / CC0)
But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.
Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence: or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.
You are partly crazy, and partly imbecile; a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is, — though some in less degree, or less perceptibly, than their fellows.
