Quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne

as to the better centuries that are coming, the artist was surely right. His error lay, in supposing that his age, more than any past or future one, is destined to see the tattered garments of Antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork…

He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies out of them...

On Andrew Jackson: His native strength compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him a sharper tool.

You are my evil spirit, you and the hard, coarse world! The leaden thoughts and the despondency that you fling upon me are my clogs, else I should long ago have achieved the task that I was created for.

She wanted--what some people want throughout life--a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanise and make her capable of sympathy.

with a heart as full of reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied gravestones.

El público es caprichoso; es capaz de negar la justicia común cuando se le exige violentamente como un derecho, lo es también de conceder más allá de lo justo cuando el requerimiento se verifica como a los déspotas les gusta, entregándose por completo al amo.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

Oh Hilda, what a treasure of sweet faith and pure imagination you hide under that little straw hat!

El impulso universal convierte en un único y vasto corazón la suma de muchos corazones.

This so frequent abortion of man's dearest projects must be taken as a proof that the deeds of earth, however etherealized by piety or genius, are without value, except as exercises and manifestations of the spirit. In heaven, all ordinary thought is higher and more melodious than Milton's song. Then, would he add another verse to any strain that he had left unfinished here?

Moonlight, in a familiar room . . . is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer.

I have come to see the nonsense of trying to describe fine scenery.

It has been delicately wrought, said the artist, calmly. As I told you, it has imbibed a spiritual essence--call it magnetism, or what you will. In an atmosphere of doubt and mockery its exquisite susceptibility suffers torture, as does the soul of him who instilled his own life into it. It has already lost its beauty; in a few moments more its mechanism would be irreparably injured.

Life had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along;—and yet it enclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment

En la posterioridad inmediata, la generación siguiente a la de los primeros emigrantes mostró la tonalidad más negra del puritanismo, y de tal manera oscurecía con ella el rostro de la nación, que todos los años siguientes no han sido suficientes para limpiarlo. Tenemos que volver a aprender el arte olvidado de la alegría.

So they lingered an instant longer. No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here, seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen woman! Here, seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one moment, true!

Clifford, except for Phoebe's more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair, till eventide.

It appears to me, said the daguerreotypist, smiling, that Uncle Venner has the principles of Fourier at the bottom of his wisdom; only they have not quite so much distinctness in his mind as in that of the systematizing Frenchman.

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.

Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner's purpose to read the human soul.

the holiest among us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward.

La s?n?tatea moral? È™i intelectual? a unui om contribuie mult leg?turile de camaraderie cu oameni deosebiÈ›i de el, pe care nu-i prea intereseaz? È›elurile lui È™i care îl oblig? s? fac? un efort mintal pentru a le aprecia aptitudinile È™i sfera de preocup?ri.

But I am weary of this place, and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery in our effort to establish the one true system. I