Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

• You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• 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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• 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

• We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• 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

• 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.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Sunlight is painting.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• 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

• Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• 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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• My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Mountains are earth’s undecaying monuments.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Moonlight is sculpture.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Life is made up of marble and mud.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Topics in Life

• It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

• 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.

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne (64)

Birth:	4th July, 1804
Death:	19th May, 1864
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Novelist, Writer

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