Quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne

Ar trebui s? se cutremure acei b?rbaÈ›i care, luând o femeie de soÈ›ie, nu-i cuceresc întreaga pasiune din inim?!

Ecco infatti una caratteristica della maggior parte degli uomini: di diventar feroci soltanto perché è in loro potestà fare del male.

Thus it was with the men of rank, on whom their eminent position imposed the guardianship of the public morals.

The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one.

Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life!—that have made thee feeble to will and to do!—that will leave thee powerless even to repent! Up, and away!

In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pain that rankles after it.

Fii tu însuÈ›i! Arat?-te lumii aÈ™a cum eÈ™ti, iar dac? nu-i dezv?lui ce-i mai r?u în tine, ofer?-i m?car o tr?s?tur? din care s? ghiceasc? asta!

There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature - whatever be the delinquencies of the individual - no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do so.

Triste momento quello in cui si cade; ma anche questa sciagura porta con sé, come ogni altro dolore umano, il suo conforto, se si sappia trarre il miglior partito dal malanno.

Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.

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

Yes! - these were her realities - all else had vanished!

I will not speak! answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. And my child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an earthly one!

Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea.

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

La felicità è come una farfalla: se l'insegui non riesci mai a prenderla, ma se ti metti tranquillo può anche posarsi su di te

I have thought of death, said she - have wished for it - would even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for anything.

At the crisis of my fever, I besought Hollingsworth to let nobody else enter the room, but continually to make me sensible of his own presence… then he should be the witness how courageously I would encounter the worst. It still impresses me almost a matter of regret, that I did not die then, when I had tolerably made up my mind to do it

The grass of many years has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is mossgrown, and good Mr. Hooper's face is dust; but awful is still the thought that it mouldered beneath the black veil.

Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay.

This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the various properties of her inner life.

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.

First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to the multitude,—that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye.