Quote

A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Age: 59 †
Born: 1804
Born: July 4
Died: 1864
Died: May 18
Diplomat
Novelist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Salem
Massachusetts
Nathaniel Hathorne
Monsieur de l'Aubépine
N. H.
Heroism
Heroic
Hero
Unless
Cannot
World

More quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Image
Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We must not think too unkindly even of the east wind. It is not, perhaps, a wind to be loved, even in its benignest moods but there are seasons when I delight to feel its breath upon my cheek, though it be never advisable to throw open my bosom and take it into my heart, as I would its gentle sisters of the south and west.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
Keep the imagination sane--that is one of the truest conditions of communion with heaven.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
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
Image
At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Life certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutalized.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
A human spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom House.
Nathaniel Hawthorne