658 Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The inward pleasure of imparting pleasure – that is the choicest of all.

We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety.

On the threshold she paused... for perchance the idea of entering, all alone, and all so changed, the home of so intense a former life was more dreary and desolate than even she could bear.

I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth and complains of lonesomeness at her mother’s side. Shall I put these feelings into words?

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.

The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth’s surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.

Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother. “We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

With Heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the Devil!

The closer you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared.