Best Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne (Top 10)
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Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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To do nothing is the way to be nothing.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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...happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release...
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
More Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes
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We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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 it be obeyed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Moonlight is sculpture.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Life is made up of marble and mud.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Is it a fact-or have I dreamt it-that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I find myself at the extremity of a long beach. How gladly does the spirit leap forth, and suddenly enlarge its sense of being to the full extent of the broad, blue, sunny deep! A greeting and a homage to the Sea! I descend over its margin, and dip my hand into the wave that meets me, and bathe my brow. That far-resounding roar is the Ocean's voice of welcome. His salt breath brings a blessing along with it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
Nathaniel Hawthorne