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Let the attempt be made, at whatever risk.

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.
Attempt
Risk
Whatever
Made

More quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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We go all wrong by too strenuous a resolution to go right.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings as now in October.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Nobody will use other people's experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State -neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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?
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Strength is incomprehensible by weakness, and, therefore, the more terrible.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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The heart of true womanhood knows where its own sphere is, and never seeks to stray beyond it!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.
Nathaniel Hawthorne