658 Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Shall we never, never get rid of this Past? cried he, keeping up the earnest tone of his preceding conversation. "It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.

Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.

What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart.

Much of the marble coldness of Hester's impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling, to thought. Standing alone, as to any dependent on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected- alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even as she had not scorned to consider it desirable, she cast away the fragments of a broken chain.

There is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow--the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it.

There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, which cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet and artist has actually expressed

If we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster.

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.