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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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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.
Moments
Faithfully
Sometimes
Intervals
Mind
Viewed
Years
Occur
Never
Revealed
Men
Aspect
Moral
Improbably
Eye
Interval

More quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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The present is burthened too much with the past.
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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All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent.
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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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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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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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
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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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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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And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.
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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The divine chemistry works in the subsoil.
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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We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
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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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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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
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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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