658 Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows – standing without, you can see no glory, nor can imagine any, but standing within every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.

Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.

She could scarcely forgive him – least of all now, when the heavy footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer! – for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world – while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not.

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

Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster-and thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster – without man, as her acknowledged principal!

Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin.

Oh, how stubbornly does love, – or even that cunning semblance of love which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into the heart, – how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist!

Tradition, – which sometimes brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in newspapers, – tradition is responsible for all contrary averments.

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.