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
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
A woman’s chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: 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
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
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.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Courage, Bravery
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
Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor has any of his own till it is too late to use it.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Experience
Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
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: Greatness, Inspiration
Insincerity in a man’s own heart must make all his enjoyments—all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
A man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dung heap or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Money
Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
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
Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Goals
This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Progress
In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Adversity
No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Life is made up of marble and mud.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Life and Living
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.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
When man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Man
Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Energy
So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Singing
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
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
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Writing
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
The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Thoughts
Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutified.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Labor
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Louisa May Alcott American Novelist
- William S. Burroughs American Novelist
- Kurt Vonnegut American Novelist
- Robert A. Heinlein American Science Fiction Writer
- Ken Kesey American Novelist
- James Lane Allen American Novelist
- Philip K. Dick American Writer
- Ray Bradbury American Science-Fiction Writer
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Philip Roth American Novelist, Short-story Writer
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