Quotes from Nathaniel Hawthorne

I sometimes fancy, said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene always made a strong impression, that Rome--mere Rome--will crowd everything else out of my heart.

Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!

The horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!

Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or--and the outward semblance is the same--crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.

It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.

All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.

A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!

Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends.

The secrets that may be buried with a human heart.

Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful doorway in the hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim's face.

Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated.

To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors.

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate.

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.

Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. [Speaking of self-posed isolation in old age.]

I'm as provocative of tears as an onion!

She assured them,too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to stablish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness.

The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.

for when a man's spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offenses, but never resentful of great ones.

Few secrets can escape an investigator who has opportunity and license to undertake such a quest and skill to follow it up.

Next to the lightest heart, the heaviest is apt to be most playful.

Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.