Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

Quotes

• 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.

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

• Life is made up of marble and mud.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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