Quote

All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent.

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.
Evanescent
Graceful
Attributes
Merely
Usually

More quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Image
Shall we never never get rid of this Past? ... It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
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
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
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
Christian faith is a grand cathedral, with divinely pictured windows. Standing without, you see no glory, nor can possibly imagine any standing within, every ray of light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
...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
Image
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
Image
It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
Some maladies are rich and precious and only to be acquired by the right of inheritance or purchased with gold.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
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
There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
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