Inspirational Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne (American Novelist)

So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Singing

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.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life is made up of marble and mud.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Life and Living

Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Humankind, Humanity

When man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Man

What would a man do if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never better himself in cool solitude?
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Solitude

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Friends and Friendship

Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Youth

Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago; and, in fine, that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared with the generations that produced them. The present is burthened too much with the past.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is a good lesson—though it may often be a hard one—for a man who has dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world’s dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Literature

Of a bitter satirist—Swift, for instance—it might be said, that the person or thing on which his satire fell shrivelled up as if the devil had spit on it.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne

A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne

See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize your Shame.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Shame

A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Heroes

Generosity is the flower of justice.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Generosity

The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Thoughts

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Selfishness

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.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Knowledge, Words, Writing

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Perspective

Easy reading is damn hard writing.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Writing

Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden…. It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Gardening

I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one’s native State;—neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Patriotism

No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne

Here, dearest Eve,” he exclaims, “here is food.” “Well,” answered she, with the germ of a housewife stirring within her, “we have been so busy to-day that a picked-up dinner must serve
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Eating

It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter … This wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency … to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there … These perceptions came too late … I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Authors & Writing

What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Guilt, Property

Zealots have an idol, to which they consecrate themselves high priests, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Zeal

Every day of my life makes me feel more and more how seldom a fact is accurately stated; how almost invariably when a story has passed through the mind of a third person it becomes, so far as regards the impression it makes in further repetitions, little better than a falsehood; and this, too, though the narrator be the most truth-seeking person in existence.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Facts

The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one’s family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Literature

If cities were built by the sound of music, then some edifices would appear to be constructed by grave, solemn tones, and others to have danced forth to light fantastic airs.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Architecture

Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Inspiration, Greatness

I have come to see the nonsense of trying to describe fine scenery.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Nature

Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Storytelling

Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutified.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Labor

Alas for the worn and heavy soul, if, whether in youth or in age, it has out-lived its privilege of spring time and sprightliness.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Laughter

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Death, Dying

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 to be obeyed.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Heroism, Heroes/Heroism, Heroes

A man—poet, prophet, or whatever he may be—readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Conceit

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, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Passion

Men of cold passions have quick eyes.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne

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