Quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne

Accuracy is twin brother to honesty, and inaccuracy to dishonesty.

Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.

A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.

Generosity is the flower of justice.

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

Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest.

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

The trees reflected in the river - they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we.

It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested.

I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.

Sunlight is like the breath of life to the pomp of autumn.

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

Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.

You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.

It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.