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

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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
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She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.
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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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It [Catholicism] supplies a multitude of external forms in which the spiritual may be clothed and manifested.
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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.
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There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life but circumstances may rouse it to activity.
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it is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.
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Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.
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It loves more readily than it hates.
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The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.
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A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
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Masculine observers, if the birth-mark did not heighten their admiration, contented themselves with wishing it away, that the world might possess one living specimen of ideal loveliness, without the semblance of a flaw.
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How is it possible to sayan unkind or irreverential word of Rome? The city of all time, and of all the world!
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It is to the credit of human nature, that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility.
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