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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.

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.
Mark
Wishing
Birth
Observers
Wish
Masculine
Specimen
Living
Admiration
Heighten
Away
Flaws
Semblance
Might
Possess
Flaw
Without
Ideal
Contented
World
Ideals
Loveliness

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By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places — whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest — where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.
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Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!
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Happiness is like a butterfly.
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Earth has one angel less and heaven one more, since yesterday.
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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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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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It is a little remarkable, that - though disinclined to talk overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my personal friends - an autobiographical impulse should twice in my life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public.
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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.
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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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Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.
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The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere.
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Ugliness without tact is horrible.
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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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Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots.
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The world, that grey-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.
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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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A man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.
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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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You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.
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Sunlight is painting.
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