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
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
Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Humanity, Humankind
At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Like certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing-day.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Youth
A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Heroes
No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Honesty, Deceit, Truth, Identity, Hypocrisy
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
So she poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Singing
The Past lies upon the Present like a giant’s dead body.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Past
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
Life is made up of marble and mud.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Life and Living
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: Heroes/Heroism, Heroism, Heroes
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
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: America
I have come to see the nonsense of trying to describe fine scenery.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Nature
Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Selfishness
But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Passion
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
Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Affection
This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Progress
Sunlight is painting.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Painters, Painting, Art
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: Property, Guilt
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: Writing, Words, Knowledge
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
When man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Man
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
Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
Topics: Joy, Happiness
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
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
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
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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