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 HAWTHORNETo 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.
More Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
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If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.
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 -
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
Life is made up of marble and mud.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years’ standing are as effective as ever.
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 will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
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Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE






