"Do anything, save to lie down and die!"
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Nathaniel Hawthorne quotes (page 6 of 15)
298 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them."
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"Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!"
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"Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream"
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"There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance; and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase it."
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"Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized."
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"Ugliness without tact is horrible."
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"Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table."
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"That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm."
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"Man's own youth is the world's youth; at least he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes."
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"And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude."
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"Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal; so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation."
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"It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility."
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"But she named the infant "Pearl," as being of great price-purchased with all she had-her mother's only treasure!"
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"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."
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"The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may going to prove one's self a fool."
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"it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom."
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"Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!"
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"This above all: be true, be true, be true."
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"You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it."
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