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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 of travels, describing scenes the most unlike that sombre one

Nathaniel Hawthorne

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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.
Doors
Travels
Study
Describing
Call
Amusement
Within
Unlike
Best
Scenes
Book
Pleasant
Winter
Sombre
Scene
Rainy

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Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing.
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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!
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If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.
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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.
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There is so much wretchedness in the world, that we may safely take the word of any mortal professing to need our assistance and, even should we be deceived, still the good to ourselves resulting from a kind act is worth more than the trifle by which we purchase it.
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Happiness is like a butterfly.
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Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.
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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.
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We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.
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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
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Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation.
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Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.
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Is it a fact-or have I dreamt it-that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?
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I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God's making it in reality.
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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.
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