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Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

US author (1804 - 1864)

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!

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 true.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Happiness is as a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

For my own part, having had much trouble in growing old, I am in no hurry to grow young again.

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.

I do not want to be a doctor and live by men’s diseases, nor a minister to live by their sins, nor a lawyer and live by their quarrels. So, I don’t see that there is anything left for me but to be an author.

What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.

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.

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

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.

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