Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one anothers actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.

And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his lifes labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the reality.

I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!

It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a mans moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his minds eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.

That old woman taught me my catechism! said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.

Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giants dead body.

Oh, glorious Art! thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. Thou art the image of the Creators own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are.

An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!

Lo! there ye stand, my children, said the figure, in a deep and solemn tone, almost sad, with its despairing awfulness, as if his once angelic nature could yet mourn for our miserable race. Depending upon one anothers hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream! Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness.

Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends.

Preach! Write! Act! Do any thing, save to lie down and die!

Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?

She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness... Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods... The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

...Chillingworth was a striking evidence of mans faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devils office.

He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.

To the untrue man, the whole universe is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothing within his grasp.

Many people are seeking, at this very moment, to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness of an eider-down pillow. But she has no great tenderness, even in her best of moods, and, sooner or later, --oftener sooner than late,-- is apt to fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away.

She has lived and loved! There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly developed rose!