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 HAWTHORNEAt no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.
More Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
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Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!
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The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.
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Salt is white and pure – there is something holy in salt.
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If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.
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What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!
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Happiness is like a butterfly.
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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 -
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 -
I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God’s making it in reality.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE -
Though we speak nonsense, God will pick out the meaning of it.
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Happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release.
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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 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.
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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.
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Just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God’s care and pity for every separate need.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE