Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

I have come to see the nonsense of trying to describe fine scenery.

Dr Johnson’s morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.

How is it possible to say an unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!

The present is burthened too much with the past.

America is now wholly given over to a d—d mob of scribbling women.

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide.

The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.

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

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to assume had he professed to be writing a Novel.

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

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.

Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collect—so some writers are lost in their collected learning.

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