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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.
Better
Always
Lived
Name
Names
Society
Common
Sense

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...Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office.
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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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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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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?
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It loves more readily than it hates.
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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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The greatest possible mint of style is to make the words absolutely disappear into the thought.
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Sunlight is painting.
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A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
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Easy reading is damn hard writing.
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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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Just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage window, so comes a lovebeam of God's care and pity for every separate need.
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Dream strange things and make them look like truth.
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We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream it may be so the moment after death.
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The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.
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We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.
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At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Life certain chintzes, calicoes, and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very sober aspect after washing day.
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Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.
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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.
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No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
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