The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNESelfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
More Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
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The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
Moonlight is sculpture.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
When scattered clouds are resting on the bosoms of hills, it seems as if one might climb into the heavenly region, earth being so intermixed with sky, and gradually transformed into it.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
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 -
Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
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 -
We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
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. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE