Nathaniel Hawthorne

1. “A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.”
2. ”A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.”
3. “A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.”
4. ”But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose.”
5. “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.”
6. “Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
7. “Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.”
8. “Happiness is as a butterfly which when pursued is always beyond our grasp, but which if you will sit down quietly may alight upon you.”
9. "If a man, sitting all alone, cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need never try to write romances."
10. “In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones, or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror, imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling them; then pray that your griefs may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not break their chain.”
11. “Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?”
12. “It is not the statesman, the warrior, or the monarch that survives, but the despised poet, whom they may have fed with their crumbs, and to whom they owe that they are now or have – name.”
13. ”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.”
14. “Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality.”
15. “Life is made up of marble and mud.”
16. “Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.”
17. “Man's own youth is the world's youth; at least he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.”
18. “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.”
19. “Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.”
20. “Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.”
21. “No man, for any considerable time, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.”
22. “Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.”
23. “She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.”
24. “She had wandered, without rule or guidance, into a moral wilderness. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers - stern and wild ones - and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”
25. “The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”
26. “The world, that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.”
27. “Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”
28. “We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.”
29. “What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!”
30. “Words -- so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”