Quote

Great men need to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas or perform their great deeds. That is, there must be an atmosphere of greatness round about them. A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.

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.
Must
Hero
Heroic
Great
Unless
Perform
Needs
Upon
Round
Men
Order
Rounds
World
Cannot
Shoulders
Ideas
Atmosphere
Need
Deeds
Lifted
Whole
Greatness
Conceive

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The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.
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Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.
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She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanize and make her capable of sympathy.
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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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Language,-human language,-after all is but little better than the croak and cackle of fowls, and other utterances of brute nature,-sometimes not so adequate.
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Ugliness without tact is horrible.
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No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us.
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If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances.
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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.
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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.
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When scattered clouds are resting on the bosoms of hills, it seems as if one might climb into the heavenly region, earth being so intermixed with sky, and gradually transformed into it.
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Let the black flower blossom as it may!
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It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman
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We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
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Let the attempt be made, at whatever risk.
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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.
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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.
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