Quote collection
298 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison."
"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."
"If human love hath power to penetrate the veil--and hath it not?--then there are yet living here a few who have the blessedness of knowing that an angel loves them."
"She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness... Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods... The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss."
"The world surely has not another place like Oxford; it is a despair to see such a place and ever to leave it, for it would take a lifetime and more than one to comprehend and enjoy it satisfactorily."
"Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them."
"'What is the Unpardonable Sin' asked the lime-burner 'It is a sin that grew within my own breast', replied Ethan Brand 'The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God'."
"In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt."
"If we take the freedom to put a friend under our microscope, we thereby insulate him from many of his true relations, magnify his peculiarities, inevitably tear him into parts, and, of course, patch him very clumsily together again. What wonder, then, should we be frightened by the aspect of a monster."
"No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change; and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us."
"Every crime destroys more Edens than our own"
"Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach."
"The Christian faith is a grand cathedral with divinely pictured windows."
"Some maladies are rich and precious and only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold."
"If cities were built by the sound of music, then some edifices would appear to be constructed by grave, solemn tones,--others to have danced forth to light fantastic airs."
"It is a little remarkable, that - though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends - an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public."
"It is very singular how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them."
"It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested."
"Genius, indeed, melts many ages into one, and thus effects something permanent, yet still with a similarity of office to that of the more ephemeral writer. A work of genius is but the newspaper of a century, or perchance of a hundred centuries."
"Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow."