Oh, how stubbornly does love, – or even that cunning semblance of love which flourishes in the imagination, but strikes no depth of root into the heart, – how stubbornly does it hold its faith until the moment comes when it is doomed to vanish into thin mist!

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

It was one of those moments – which sometimes occur only at the interval of years – when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his minds age.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

It depresses me to look at old frescos,” responded the Count; “it is a pain, yet not enough of a pain to answer as a penance.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Donatello, you had better take one of those gay, boyish artists for your companion,” said Miriam, when she found the Italian youth at her side.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

They are unavoidable at this moment, standing, as you do, on the outer verge of your long seclusion, and peopling the world with ugly shapes, which you will soon find to be as unreal as the giants and ogres of a child’s story-book. I find nothing so singular in life, as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it. So it will be with what you think so terrible.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments...

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works?

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may die other human souls!

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened! Meddle no more with it! Begin all new!

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

There was a sense within her, – too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind, – that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one plant that gave it unity.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind is spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of infinite Purity, we are sinners all alike.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast – at her, the child of honorable parents – at her, who had once been innocent – as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Whenever any subject so forcibly affects the mind, time is well spent in thinking of it.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

The girl waved her hand to Hepzibah and Clifford, and went up the street; a religion in herself, warm, simple, true, with a substance that could walk on earth, and a spirit that was capable of heaven.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Nevertheless, in spite of all these professional grudges, artists are conscious of a social warmth from each other’s presence and contiguity. They shiver at the remembrance of their lonely studios in the unsympathizing cities of their native land. For the sake of such brotherhood as they can find, more than for any good that they get from galleries, they linger year after year in Italy, while their originality dies out of them, or is polished away as a barbarism.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

You, Sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Little Pearl, Hester’s young child, fulminates with unconscious aggression in the wild tantrums that, Hawthorne says, reflect the illicit desire with which she was conceived.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

The road grew wilder and drearier and more faintly traced, and vanished at length, leaving him in the heart of the dark wilderness, still rushing onward with the instinct that guides mortal man to evil.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

They had looked love with eyes that conveyed the holy secret from the depths of one soul into the depths of the other, as if it were too sacred to be whispered.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne
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