Nathaniel Hawthorne

Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral;—the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones.

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

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

Let the black flower blossom as it may!

What we did had a consecration of its own.

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream.

But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it.

If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.

On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.

By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.

We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?

We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate the holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment good in itself, is not good to do religiously.

A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

What other dungeon i^ so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.

There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October.

The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring.

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.

One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away.

Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster—and thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster—without man, as her acknowledged principal!

Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.

Language,—human language,—after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,—sometimes not so adequate.

It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.

A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.

Great men have to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas, or perform their great deeds.

There is no such thing in man’s nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.

He whose genius appears deepest and truest excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws out occasionally a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is profoundly though unutterably conscious.

Generosity is the flower of justice.

Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person’s expense!

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless thy win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

A man’s soul may be buried and perish under a dungheap or in a furrow of the field, just as well as under a pile of money.

Men of cold passions have quick eyes.

A woman’s chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.