Quote

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

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.
Individual
Sudden
Another
Shock
Come
Contact
Matter
Individuals
Contention
Heart
Approach
Purposes
Deep
Dread
Sides
Electric
Purpose
Seldom

More quotes by 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
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
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
Image
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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
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
Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.
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
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
Image
Technologies of easy travel give us wings they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
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
Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested.
Nathaniel Hawthorne