Nathaniel Hawthorne (/ˈhɔːθɔːrn/; né Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist, dark romantic, and short story writer.
Moonlight is sculpture.
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!
We sometimes congratulate ourselves.
Every crime destroys more Edens than our 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.
Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beautiful results--the fragrance of celestial flowers--to the daily life of others.
New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.
No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee.
I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.
I love my mother, but there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between people of strong feelings.
Let the black flower blossom as it may!
Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates.
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.
Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.
When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod-or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly-thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude.
The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become.
As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and the mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin.
Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.
Let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious to follow out one's day-dream to its natural consummation, although if the vision has been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.