Quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne

We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.

Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind, with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad.

She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith, therefore, that its result would be for good.

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

Human nature will not nourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.

It was sorrowful to think how many days, and weeks, and months, and years of toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away in this forgotten corner never more to be glanced at by human eyes.

Oriunde exist? o inim? È™i o minte, bolile trupeÈ™ti poart? însemnele acestora.

Siate sinceri! Siate sempre sinceri! E mostrate francamente al mondo, se non proprio il vostro lato peggiore, almeno qualche aspetto, da cui possa essere noto il peggiore male che è in voi.

Societatea are un caracter despotic; e în stare s? refuze cuiva cea mai elementar? dreptate cât timp este cerut? cu prea mare îndârjire, ca un drept; dar aproape la fel de des acord? mai mult decât dreptate - aÈ™a cum le place despoÈ›ilor - când se face apel la generozitatea ei.

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.

If we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find [the] same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud.

Oh, how stubbornly does love,—or even that cunning semblance of love which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into the heart,—how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist!

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.

Sería un curioso tema de investigación y observación el de si, en el fondo, el amor y el odio no son la misma cosa. Ambos hacen que un individuo dependa de otro en lo que se refiere al alimento de su espíritu; ambos dejan, al amante apasionado o, igualmente, al que odia con pasión, desoladamente solitario cuando su objeto desaparece.

The besetting sin of a philanthropist, it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity. His sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men. At some point of his course—I know not exactly when or where—he is tempted to palter with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside his private conscience.

On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.

And the shame!--the indelicacy!--the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!

What can a ruined soul, like mine, effect towards the redemption of other souls??—or a polluted soul towards their purification?

The closer you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared.

Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped.

I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house. So I have spent almost all the daylight hours in open air.

It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

Creation was not finished till the poet came to interpret, and so complete it.