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But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport; because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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 the true. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Calm, gentle, passionless as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Not yet hardened, many young die good. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; -neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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God", said the dying man, pointing his finger, with a ghastly look, at the undismayed countenance of his enemy, "God will give him blood to drink! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nothing is more unaccountable than the spell that often lurks in a spoken word. A thought may be present to the mind, and two minds conscious of the same thought, but as long as it remains unspoken their familiar talk flows quietly over the hidden idea. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If mankind were all intellect, they would be continually changing, so that one age would be entirely unlike another. The great conservative is the heart, which remains the same in all ages; so that commonplaces of a thousand years' standing are as effective as ever. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or
and the outward semblance is the same
crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The holiest among us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It will startle you to see what slaves we are to by-gone times-to Death, if we give the matter the right word! ... We read in Dead Men's books! We laugh at Dead Men's jokes, and cry at Dead Men's pathos! ... Whatever we seek to do, of our own free motion, a Dead Man's icy hand obstructs us! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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His stories are good to hear at night, because we can dream about them asleep; and good in the morning, too, because then we can dream about them awake. (Cowslip) -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never
any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Though we speak nonsense, God will pick out the meaning of it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The staunch, old soakers, on the other hand men who, if put on tap, would have yielded a red alcoholic liquor, by way of blood usually confined themselves to plain brandy-and-water, gin, or West India rum; and, -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thoughts alone suffice them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is a kind of natural magic that enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It loves more readily than it hates. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gayety. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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You are partly crazy, and partly imbecile; a ruin, a failure, as almost everybody is,
though some in less degree, or less perceptibly, than their fellows. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom, while out of a still lower depth came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The subject had reference to secret sin and those sad mysteries which we hide from our nearest and dearest, and would fain conceal from our own consciousness, even forgetting that the Omniscient can detect them. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The sorrow that lay cold in her mother's heart ... converted it into a tomb. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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there was something of the women molded into the great, stalwart frame of Hollingsworth; nor was he ashamed of it; as men often are of what is best in them -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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All through life that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love and kept him in that saddest of all prisons his own heart; -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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To the untrue man, the whole universe is false- it is impalpable- it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself is in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The secret is," said Phoebe, smiling, "that I have learned how to talk with hens and chickens. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I know what to think when a young girl shivers by a warm hearth and complains of lonesomeness at her mother's side. Shall I put these feelings into words? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There are few things, - whether in the outward world, or to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought, - few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Is not the kindred of a common fate a closer tie than that of birth? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so in exorable as one's self! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A recluse, like Hepzibah, usually displays remarkable frankness, and at least temporary affability, on being absolutely cornered, and brought to the point of personal intercourse; like the angel whom Jacob wrestled with, she is ready to bless you when once overcome. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There is something more awful in happiness than in sorrow
the latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble at it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A vast deal of human sympathy runs along the electric line of needlework, stretching from the throne to the wicker chair of the humble seamstress. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Families are always rising and falling in America. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There can be ... no power ... to disclose ... the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them until the day when all hidden things be revealed. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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For, has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after a certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put ourselves to death in whole-hearted simplicity? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had mediated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Entire development would secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement; the higher the state the -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A kind Providence has so skilfully adapted sex to sex and the mass of individuals to each other, that, with certain obvious exceptions, any male and female may be moderately happy in the married state. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier; but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Preach! Write! Act! Do anything save to lie down and die. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule?" asked Scicpio. "And what for do you look so black at me?"
"No matter, darky," said the carpenter. "Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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In cases of distasteful occupation, the second day is generally worse than the first; we return to the rack with all the soreness of the preceding torture in our limbs. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Let the black flower blossom as it may! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A tendency to speculation, though it may keep woman quiet, as it does man, yet makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A singular fact, that, when man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The divine chemistry works in the subsoil. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Or this: - that the whole universe, her own sex and yours, and Providence, or Destiny, to boot, make common cause against the woman who swerves one hair's breadth out of the beaten track. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Depending upon one another's hearts, ye had still hoped that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful doorway in the hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim's face. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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When he is cheerful
when the sun shines into his mind
then I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow falls! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The child probably overheard their voices; for, looking up to the window, with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrunk, with nervous dread, from the light missile. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I have come to see the nonsense of trying to describe fine scenery. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is the surest test of genuine love, that it brings back our early simplicity to the worldliest of us. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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For when a man's spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offenses, but never resentful of great ones. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Soul, no heart, no mind; nothing, as I have already said, but instincts; and yet, withal, so cunningly had the few materials of his character been put together that there was no painful perception of deficiency, -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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That old woman taught me my catechism! said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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This dull river has a deep religion of its own; so, let us trust, has the dullest human soul, though, perhaps, unconsciously. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It was as if she had been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life and be a law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hadst thou sought the whole earth over," said he, looking darkly at the clergyman, "there was no place so secret- no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me,- save on this very scaffold! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised a kindred wilderness in the human child. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But I am weary of this place, and sick to death of playing at philanthropy and progress. Of all varieties of mock-life, we have surely blundered into the very emptiest mockery in our effort to establish the one true system. I -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow creature, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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London is like the grave in one respect
any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nervous and excitable persons need to talk a great deal, by way of letting off their steam. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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As the life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other human beings, there remained a duty towards him, -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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And we have so far improved upon the custom of Adam and Eve, that we generally furnish forth our feasts with a portion of some delicate calf or lamb, whose unspotted innocence entitles them to the happiness of becoming our sustenance. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Happiness is like a butterfly ... -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But the past was not dead. Once in a great while, the thoughts
that had seemed so vital and so active, yet had been put to rest
so quietly, revived again. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The trees reflected in the river - they are unconscious of a spiritual world so near to them. So are we. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We do ourselves wrong, and too meanly estimate the holiness above us, when we deem that any act or enjoyment good in itself, is not good to do religiously. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman's heart! She will not speak! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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He seemed to be in quest for mental food, not heart sustenance. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Your fantastic anticipations make me discern all the more forcibly what a wretched, unsubstantial scheme is this, on which we have wasted a precious summer of our lives. Do you seriously imagine that any such realities as you, and many others here, have dreamed of, will ever be brought to pass? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The present is burthened too much with the past. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Torpid systems - it was pleasant to hear them -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Mother," said little Pearl, "the sunshine does not love you. It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing a good way off. Stand you here, and let me run and catch it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She could no longer borrow from the future to ease her present grief. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A poor, deceived, and half-delirious girl, who, exclaiming that she was the most worthless thing alive or dead, attempted to cast herself into the fire amid all that wrecked and broken trumpery of the world. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Echo is the voice of a reflection in a mirror. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away, and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Or in the forest; mingling various walks with the splash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She knocked a third time, three regular strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for, modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help playing some tune of what we feel , upon the senseless wood. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Jim Crow, moreover, was seen executing his world-renowned dance, in gingerbread. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The struggle, if it were one, need not be described. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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 -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Writing can come naturally to some. Still, when it comes to good writing, this is true: Easy reading is damn hard writing. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Or - but this more rarely happened - she would be convulsed with a rage of grief, and sob out her love for her mother, in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart, by breaking it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is my opinion that a man's soul may be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow field, just as well as under a pile of money. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The moment when a man's head drops off is seldom or never, I am inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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This above all: be true, be true, be true. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world , individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever. (Wakefield) -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Thou are my only reality
all other people are but shadows to me: all events and actions, in which thou dost not mingle, are but dreams. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The calmer thought is not always the right thought, just as the distant view is not always the truest view -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Then, moreover, the white locks of age were sometimes found to be the thatch of an intellectual tenement in good repair. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Next to the lightest heart, the heaviest is apt to be most playful. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The ever relentless -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But year after year that summons, unheard but felt, was disobeyed. His one secret thought became like a chain binding down his spirit and like a serpent gnawing into his heart. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Another phenomenon, still more strikingly modern, was a package of lucifer matches, which, in old times, would have been thought actually to borrow their instantaneous flame from the nether fires of Tophet. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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CHAPTER XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE CHAPTER XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY CHAPTER XXII. THE PROCESSION CHAPTER XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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My wife is - in the strictest sense - my sole companion, and I need no other. There is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The inward pleasure of imparting pleasure - that is the choicest of all. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Ought a woman to disclose her frailties earlier than the wedding day? Few husbands, I assure you, make the discovery in such good season, and still fewer complain that these trifles are concealed too long. Well, what a strange man you are! Poh! you are joking. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-fillings, so did our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met with. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I never, till now, had a friend who could give me repose; all have disturbed me, and, whether for pleasure or pain, it was still disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Men of cold passions have quick eyes. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Been calm in temperament, kindly, though not of warm -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you can see no glory, nor can imagine any, but standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and evenly coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Methinks it is a token of healthy and gentle characteristics, when women of high thoughts and accomplishments love to sew; especially as they are never more at home with their own hearts than while so occupied. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Most people are so constituted that they can only be virtuous in a certain routine; an irregular course of life demoralizes them. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places - whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest - where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Clergymen, judges, statesmen
the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day
stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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With the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The love of posterity is the consequence of the necessity of death. If a man were sure of living forever here, he would not care about his offspring. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Masculine observers, if the birth-mark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness, without the semblance of a flaw. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Now are ye undeceived. Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Possibly, some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement
however serious, however trifling
all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But it is a strange experience, to a man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Those with whom we can apparently become well acquainted in a few moments are generally the most difficult to rightly know and to understand. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I find nothing so singular to life as that everything appears to lose its substance the instant one actually grapples with it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Wouldst thou, then, have preferred the condition of a weak woman, exposed to all evil and capable of none? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But there is an influence in the light of the morning that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun's decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and hand till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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No fountain so small but that Heaven may be imaged in its bosom. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Human beings owe a debt of love to one another because there is no other method of paying the debt of love and care which all of us owe to providence. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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'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'. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What a happy and holy fashion it is that those who love one another should rest on the same pillow. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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They looked neither older nor younger now; the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet today ... -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The sun was still marking the passage of the first bright hour in a history that was not destined to be all so bright. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It might be that he lived a more real life within his thoughts ... -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Yesterday I visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart. The present is burdened too much with the past. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings as now in October. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Give me a rose, that I may press its thorns, and prove myself awake by the sharp touch of pain! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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On such a Sabbath morn, were we pure enough to be its medium, we should be conscious of the earth's natural worship ascending through our frames, on whatever spot of ground we stood. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is because the spirit is inestimable, that the lifeless body is so little valued. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Laughter, when out of place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of feeling, may be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched and so transfigured. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Why dost thou smile so at me?" inquired Hester, troubled at the expression of his eyes. "Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?"
"Not thy soul," he answered, with another smile. "No, not thine! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Benevolence is the twin of pride. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I love my mother, but there has been, ever since my boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between us, such as is apt to come between people of strong feelings. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The closer you penetrated to the substance of his mind, the sounder it appeared. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into sentence: Be True! Be True! Be True! Show freely to the world if not the worst, yet some trait whereby the worst can be inferred. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The most powerful minds are not always the best acquainted with their own feelings. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I felt as if it were better, or not worse, to have compressed my enjoyments and sufferings into a few wild years, and then to rest myself in an early grave, than to have chosen the untroubled and ungladdened course of the crowd before me, whose days were all alike, and a long lifetime like each day. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Perhaps a germ of love was springing in their hearts so pure that it might blossom in Paradise, since it could not be matured on earth; -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Thou shalt say a thousand things, and saying them a thousand times over, thou shalt still have said nothing! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Who can tell where happiness may come, or where, though an expected guest, it may never show its face? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The sick in mind, and, perhaps, in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Moonlight is sculpture. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A writer of story books! What kind of business in life-what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation-may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Cupid in these latter times has probably laid aside his bow and arrow, and uses fire-arms
a pistol
perhaps a revolver. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is a good lesson - though it may often be a hard one - for a man ... to step aside out of the narrow circle in which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken foot. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release ... -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nothing gives a sadder sense of decay than this loss or suspension of the power to deal with unaccustomed things, and to keep up with the swiftness of the passing moment. [Speaking of self-posed isolation in old age.] -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Distil drops of bitterness into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer's defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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He had a winged nature; she was rather of the vegetable kind, and could hardly be kept long alive, if drawn up by the roots. Thus it happened that the relation heretofore existing between her brother and herself was changed. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehoods, or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold, and dishonors the baser metal. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Last night, there came a frost, which has done great damage to my garden ... It is sad that Nature will play such tricks on us poor mortals, inviting us with sunny smiles to confide in her, and then, when we are entirely within her power, striking us to the heart. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It was a tender and heart-dissolving prayer, full of sorrow, yet so imbued with celestial hopes, that the music of a heavenly harp, swept by the fingers of the dead, seemed faintly to be heard among the saddest accents of the minister. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Death should take me while I am in the mood. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Children came running with their mothers' scissors, or the carving knife, or the paternal razor, or anything else that lacked an edge (except, indeed, poor Clifford's wits) that the grinder might apply the article to his magic wheel, and give it back as good as new. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If we would know what heaven is before we come thither, let us retire into the depths of our own spirits, and we shall find it there among holy thoughts and feelings. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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This greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things-from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, This, too, will pass away. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow, while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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May not one man have several voices, Robin, as well as two complexions? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A throng of bearded men in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and other bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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In my own behalf, I rejoice that I could once think better of the world's improvability than it deserved. It is a mistake into which men seldom fall twice in a lifetime; or, if so, the rarer and higher is the nature that can thus magnanimously persist in error. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom ... -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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In an ancient though not very populous settlement, in a retired corner of one of the New England states, arise the walls of a seminary of learning, which, for the convenience of a name, shall be entitled Harley College. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What we need for our happiness is often close at hand, if we knew but how to seek for it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The experiment, so far as its original projectors were concerned, proved, long ago, a failure; first lapsing into Fourierism, and dying, as it well deserved, for this infidelity to its own higher spirit. Where -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Little, impalpable worlds, were those soap-bubbles, with the big world depicted, in hues bright as imagination, on the nothing of their surface. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Few secrets can escape an investigator who has opportunityand liceense to undertake such a quest and skill to follow it up. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Thus content with an inner sphere which they inhabit together, it is not immediately that the outward world can obtrude itself upon their notice. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old house [with dry rot in its structure and perhaps also in its inhabitants]; ... it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere that that. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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He whose genius appears deepest and truest excels his fellows in nothing save the knack of expression; he throws out occasionally a lucky hint at truths of which every human soul is profoundly though unutterably conscious. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If it be a sign of mourning," replied Mr. Hooper, "I, perhaps, like most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by a black veil. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I had neglected to provide myself with books, and as we crept along at the dull rate of four miles per hour, I soon felt the foul fiend Ennui coming upon me -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She has lived and loved! There is no folded petal, no latent dewdrop, in this perfectly developed rose! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Ugliness without tact is horrible. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Pleasant is a rainy winter's day, within doors! The best study for such a day, or the best amusement,
call it which you will,
is a book ... -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Yet perhaps the pale-faced congregation was almost as fearful a sight to the minister as his black veil to them. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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These feelings, together with the deep degradation of his mind, made him resolve that no circumstances should again draw him into an axcess of wine. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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On Andrew Jackson: His native strength compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him a sharper tool. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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And I love to watch how the day, tired as it is, lags away reluctantly, and hates to be called yesterday so soon. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken. It -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency - which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours - to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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As the architecture of a country always follows the earliest structures, American architecture should be a refinement of the log-house. The Egyptian is so of the cavern and the mound; the Chinese, of the tent; the Gothic, of overarching trees; the Greek, of a cabin. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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When individuals approach one another with deep purposes on both sides they seldom come at once to the matter which they have most at heart. They dread the electric shock of a too sudden contact with it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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evil is the nature of mankind. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I heard a neigh. Oh, such a brisk and melodious neigh it was. My very heart leapt with the sound. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Development of the love of the beautiful, such as might have made him a poet, a painter, or a sculptor, and which was -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It [the scarlet letter] had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Tradition, - which sometimes brings down truth that history has let slip, but is oftener the wild babble of the time, such as was formerly spoken at the fireside and now congeals in newspapers, - tradition is responsible for all contrary averments. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A grave, wherever found, preaches a short and pithy sermon to the soul. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Be true, be true, be true. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Success presented itself as an impossibility, and the hope of it as a wild hallucination. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster-and thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster
without man, as her acknowledged principal! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But never had their youthful beauty seemed so pure and high, as when its glow was chastened by adversity. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A man
poet, prophet, or whatever be may be
readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Never was there a dingier, uglier, less picturesque city than London ... it is really wonderful that so much brick and stone, for centuries together, should have been built up with so poor a result. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The best of us being unfit to die, what an unexpressible absurdity to put the worst to death. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Keep the imagination sane
that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Life is made up of marble and mud. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Sunlight is painting. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Do anything, save to lie down and die! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Sleeping or waking, we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She assured them,too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to stablish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A grave and dark-clad company, quoth Goodman Brown. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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He had lost his faith in the invisible, and now prided himself, as such unfortunates invariably do, in the wisdom which rejected much that even his eye could see, and trusted confidently in nothing but what his hand could touch. This is the calamity of men whose spiritual part dies out of them ... -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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All have some artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine characteristic. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I sometimes fancy," said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene always made a strong impression, "that Rome
mere Rome
will crowd everything else out of my heart. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It was one of those moments - which sometimes occur only at the interval of years - when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Salt is white and pure - there is something holy in salt. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Shall we not spend our immortal life together? Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Women are safer in perilous situations and emergencies than men, and might be still more so if they trusted themselves more confidingly to the chivalry of manhood. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. That is, there must be an atmosphere of greatness round about them. A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Every crime destroys more Edens than our own -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Daily receiving the old physician in his study; or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation's sake, watching the processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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In youth men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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This shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind to anybody again as long as I live. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Let us not look back, the past is gone! Wherefore should we linger upon it now? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious to follow out one's day-dream to its natural consummation, although if the vision has been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Be it sin or no, I hate the man! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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To be left alone in the wide world with scarcely a friend,
this makes the sadness which, striking its pang into the minds of the young and the affectionate, teaches them too soon to watch and interpret the spirit-signs of their own hearts. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There is no greater bugbear than a strong willed relative in the circle of his own connections. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The Christian faith is a grand cathedral with divinely pictured windows. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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O, what a joy for a shy man to feel himself so solitary, that he may lift his voice to its highest pitch without hazard of a listener! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Unquestionably we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in the world; and I myself have felt the heart-throb at sight of it, as sensibly as other men. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Death possesses a good deal, of real estate, namely, the graveyard in every town. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Articulate words are a harsh clamor and dissonance. When man arrives at his highest perfection, he will again be dumb. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Dream strange things and make them look like truth. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Men of his strength of purpose, and customary sagacity, if they chance to adopt a mistaken opinion in practical matters, so wedge it and fasten it among things known to be true, that to wrench it out of their minds is hardly less difficult than pulling up an oak. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his emoluments. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. (Wakefield) -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows or suspects that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness, said old Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A good man's prayers are golden recompense!" rejoined old Roger Chillingworth, as he took his leave. "Yea, they are the current gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King's own mint-mark on them! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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On the threshold she paused ... for perchance the idea of entering, all alone, and all so changed, the home of so intense a former life was more dreary and desolate than even she could bear. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I wonder he is not afraid to be alone with himself." "Men sometimes are so," said her husband. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The past is but a coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Generosity is the flower of justice. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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People always grow more foolish, unless they take care to grow wiser and wiser ... -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A forced smile is uglier than a frown. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A modern child could teach old Hepzibah more than old Hepzibah could teach the child. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Clifford, except for Phoebe's more active instigation, would ordinarily have yielded to the torpor which had crept through all his modes of being, and which sluggishly counselled him to sit in his morning chair, till eventide. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Some maladies are rich and precious, and only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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With Heaven above and Faith below, I will yet stand firm against the Devil! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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No better occupation than to look down into the garden. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Oh Hilda, what a treasure of sweet faith and pure imagination you hide under that little straw hat! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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It is a strange experience for a man of pride and feeling to know that his interests are in the control of strangers who don't like or understand him. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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When scattered clouds are resting on the bosoms of hills, it seems as if one might climb into the heavenly region, earth being so intermixed with sky, and gradually transformed into it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues, before I could see her as she really was. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A bookworm-one of those men who are born to gnaw dead thoughts. His clothes, you see, are covered with the dust of libraries. He has no inward fountain of ideas ... " - "Earth's Holocaust", Hawthorne -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The influential classes, and those who take upon themselves to be leaders of the people, are fully liable to all the passionate error that has ever characterized the maddest mob. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.
[Notebook, Oct. 10, 1842] -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Such has often been my apathy, when objects long sought, and earnestly desired, were placed within my reach. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence ... -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The secrets that may be buried with a human heart. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A screen ... the scenery and the figures of life were perfectly represented, but with that bewitching, yet indescribably difference, which always makes a picture, an image, or a shadow, so much more attractive than the original. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A stale article, if you did it in a good, warm, sunny smile will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Let the attempt be made, at whatever risk. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Life figures itself to me as a festal or funereal procession. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I have an almost miraculous power of escaping from necessities of this kind. Destiny itself has often been worsted in the attempt to get me out to dinner. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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If we look through all the heroic fortunes of mankind, we shall find [the] same entanglement of something mean and trivial with whatever is noblest in joy or sorrow. Life is made up of marble and mud. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Angels do not toil, but let their good works grow out of them. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory; and any man who does, is not worthy of one. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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To do nothing is the way to be nothing. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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As the moral gloom of the world overpowers all systematic gaiety, even so was their home of wild mirth made desolate amid the sad forest. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The bookworm of great libraries. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What is the voice of song when the world lacks the ear of taste? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Easy reading is damn hard writing. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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O exquisite relief! She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom! By -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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You are my evil spirit, you and the hard, coarse world! The leaden thoughts and the despondency that you fling upon me are my clogs, else I should long ago have achieved the task that I was created for. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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She wanted - what some people want throughout life - a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The love of science to rival the love of woman, in its depth and absorbing energy. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I want my happiness! ... Many, many years have I waited for it! It is late! It is late! I want my happiness! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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MAY AND NOVEMBER VI. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man's book too, and that with mine own blood! -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A pure hand needs no glove to cover it. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I do detest all offices - all, at least, that are held on a political tenure. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Some illusions ... are the shadows of great truths. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Sunlight is like the breath of life to the pomp of autumn. -- Nathaniel Hawthorne