Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Clifford, except for Phoebe's more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair, till eventide.”

“The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is, to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.”

“Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.”

“Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into sentence: Be True! Be True! Be True! Show freely to the world if not the worst, yet some trait whereby the worst can be inferred.”

“There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.”

“A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.”

“The sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart... converted it into a tomb.”

“It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another; each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his object.”

“...Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office.”

“...the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.”

“Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!”

“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.”

“...daily receiving the old physician in his study; or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation's sake, watching the processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.”

“The child probably overheard their voices; for, looking up to the window, with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrunk, with nervous dread, from the light missile.”

“Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful doorway in the hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim's face.”

“A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.”

“Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.”

“No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee.”

“Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”

“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.”

“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.”

“In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.”

“Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.”

“Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.”

“As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.”

“In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.”

“We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.”

“Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

“Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.”

“Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the carving knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits) that the grinder might apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new.”

“A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!”

“Death should take me while I am in the mood.”

“Do anything, save to lie down and die!”

“There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about.”

“Be it sin or no, I hate the man!”

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”

“But what could be the purpose of the unseasonable toil, which was again resumed, as the watchman knew by the lines of lamp-light through the crevices of Owen Warland's shutters? The townspeople had one comprehensive explanation of all these singularities. Owen Warland had gone mad! How universally efficacious--how satisfactory, too, and soothing to the injured sensibility of narrowness and dullness--is this easy method of accounting for whatever lies beyond the world's most ordinary scope!- "The Artist of the Beautiful”

“It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwanted jollity that brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year - as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries - the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.”

“Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.”

“But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had mediated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.”

“The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”

“Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. [Speaking of self-posed isolation in old age.]”

“It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.”

“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”