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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.

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.
People
Stop
Point
Happy
Making
Happier
Might
Ridiculous
Without
Short
Matter
Taste
Even
Choose

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All brave men love for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests.
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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 a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.
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Happiness is like a butterfly.
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All merely graceful attributes are usually the most evanescent.
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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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The breath of peace was fanning her glorious brow, her head was bowed a very little forward, and a tress, escaping from its bonds, fell by the side of her pure white temple, and close to her just opened lips it hung there motionless! no breath disturbed its repose! She slept as an angel might sleep, having accomplished the mission of her God.
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The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages.
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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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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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And what is more melancholy than the old apple-trees that linger about the spot where once stood a homestead, but where there is now only a ruined chimney rising our of a grassy and weed-grown cellar? They offer their fruit to every wayfarer--apples that are bitter-sweet with the moral of times vicissitude.
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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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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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If truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom.
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This greatest mortal consolation, which we derive from the transitoriness of all things-from the right of saying, in every conjuncture, This, too, will pass away.
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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.
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Easy reading is damn hard writing.
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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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We must not think too unkindly even of the east wind. It is not, perhaps, a wind to be loved, even in its benignest moods but there are seasons when I delight to feel its breath upon my cheek, though it be never advisable to throw open my bosom and take it into my heart, as I would its gentle sisters of the south and west.
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A screen... the scenery and the figures of life were perfectly represented, but with that bewitching, yet indescribably difference, which always makes a picture, an image, or a shadow, so much more attractive than the original.
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