Nathaniel Hawthorne (/ˈhɔːθɔːrn/; né Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer.
Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!
Salt is white and pure - there is something holy in salt.
Shall we never never get rid of this Past?. . . It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.
Men of cold passions have quick eyes.
The present is burthened too much with the past.
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.
We are but shadows: we are, not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be touched. That touch creates us--then we begin to be--thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity.
It is a little remarkable, that - though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends - an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.
Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.
In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence.
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!
I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.
A throng of bearded men in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and other bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
This above all: be true, be true, be true.
The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view
I wish I had the gift of making rhymes, for methinks there is poetry in my head and heart since I have been in love with you.
It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money.
Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.
That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere. . . the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.
America is now wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash - and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumerable editions of the Lamplighter, and other books neither better nor worse? - worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by 100,000.