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 true.
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Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Explore 31 verified and sourced quotes attributed to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Open any quote for its dedicated page, source details and related topics.
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Selected quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne
No fountain is so small but that heaven may be imaged in its bosom.
His words had power because they accorded with his thoughts; and his thoughts had reality and depth because they harmonized with the life he had always lived. It was not mere breath that this preacher uttered; they were the words of life, because a life of good deeds and holy love was melted into them. Pearls, pure and rich, had been dissolved into the precious draught.
Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.
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.
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 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.
We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
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.
Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
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.
Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
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.
All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.
Sunlight is painting.
Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
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.
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.
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