Life Quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sunlight is like the breath of life to the pomp of autumn.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts...”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life is made up of marble and mud.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“I find nothing so singular in life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life,…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

It is because the spirit is inestimable, that the lifeless body is so little valued.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe!”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

A screen... the scenery and the figures of life were perfectly represented, but with that bewitching, yet indescribably difference, which always makes…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway,…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger,…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It is a very genuine admiration, that with which persons too shy or too awkward to take a due part in the…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table. We come to it freshly, in the dewy youth…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“His was the profession at that era in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for—leaving a higher…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another’s actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

“They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of life.…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

We are but shadows: we are, not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real about us is but the…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of…

— Nathaniel Hawthorne