Quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest-trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say.

It seemed to me—the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word—it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.

It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most quietude to the external regulations of society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action

In short, there has seldom been seen so depressed and sad a figure as this young girl's; and it was hardly possible to help being angry with her, from mere despair of doing anything for her comfort.

She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility; it was as if she were hovering in the air and might vanish, like a glimmering light, that comes we know not whence, and goes we know not whither.

She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess

All human progress is in a circle; or, to use a more accurate and beautiful figure, in an ascending spiral curve. While we fancy ourselves going straight forward, and attaining, at every step, an entirely new position of affairs, we do actually return to something long ago tried and abandoned, but which we now find etherealized, refined, and perfected to its ideal. The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future.

El ángel y apóstol de la revelación venidera debía ser una mujer, sin duda, pero una mujer virtuosa, pura, hermosa, sabia y prudente, todo ello no a través de una oscura pena sino a la luz de la alegría, poniendo de manifiesto, con la verdad de su ejemplo, cómo el amor consagrado debe hacernos felices.

She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own.

La razza umana, come ogni altro seme, non prospera rigogliosa, se trapiantata nello stesso terreno troppo a lungo sfruttato.

seize the public by the button

I have no heavenly father.

It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman

La gaiezza dei vecchi somiglia assai da vicino al riso dei bimbi: negli uni e negli altri l'allegria non nasce dallo spirito e dall'intelligenza, ma è appena un raggio di gioia che passa e illumina, come una carezza di sole, tanto il ramo verde e tenero quanto il tronco rugoso.

The links that united her to the rest of human kind - links of flowers, or silk or gold - had all been broken.

Death was too definite an object to be wished for, or avoided.

And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.

Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works?

Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may die other human souls!

Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it! Begin all new!

Thy acts are like mercy," said Hester, bewildered and appalled. "But thy words interpret thee as a terror!

In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble imbue of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.

No hay una sola puntada en esa letra bordada que no haya sentido en su corazón.