Quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.

I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house." [ Notebook , Oct. 10, 1842]

Death should take me while I am in the mood.

Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.

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

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

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

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

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

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness... Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods... The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.

We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.

No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.

It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man... to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.

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.

Do anything, save to lie down and die!

if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom...

Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.

There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.