Authors — Quotes

Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes: 16

Life is made up of marble and mud.
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
The Scarlet Letter
Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.
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.
Death should take me while I am in the mood.
The Blithedale Romance
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.
The Scarlet Letter
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.
Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.
Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.
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.
The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.
The Birthmark and Other Stories
He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,-- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.
The House of the Seven Gables