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What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?
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.
Names
Society
Common
Sense
Better
Always
Lived
Name
More quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne
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
Insincerity in a man's own heart must make all his enjoyments, all that concerns him, unreal so that his whole life must seem like a merely dramatic representation.
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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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What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
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There is great incongruity in this idea of monuments, since those to whom they are usually dedicated need no such recognition to embalm their memory and any man who does, is not worthy of one.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Truth often finds its way to the mind close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising directness of matters in regard to which we practise an unconscious self-deception during our waking moments.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, utopia is only the shadow of a dream
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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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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.
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Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.
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Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.
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London is like the grave in one respect -- any man can make himself at home there and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Men of cold passions have quick eyes.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moonlight is sculpture.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Families are always rising and falling in America.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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
Happiness is like a butterfly.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
We are as happy as people can be, without making themselves ridiculous, and might be even happier but, as a matter of taste, we choose to stop short at this point.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Of all the events which constitute a person's biography, there is scarcely one ... to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.
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