Nathaniel Hawthorne
A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.Collection: Brainy
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.Collection: Poetry
Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Relationship
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.Collection: Art
Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.Collection: Inspirational
It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.Collection: Health
Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.Collection: Time
Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.Collection: Nature
The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.Collection: Courage
A stale article, if you dip it in a good, warm, sunny smile, will go off better than a fresh one that you've scowled upon.Collection: Smile
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.Collection: Romantic
Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.Collection: Friendship
Sunlight is painting.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Happiness
Life is made up of marble and mud.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Happiness
Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.Collection: Respect
Moonlight is sculpture.Collection: Nature
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.
Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.
The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.
A hero cannot be a hero unless in a heroic world.
We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.
Our Creator would never have made such lovely days, and have given us the deep hearts to enjoy them, above and beyond all thought, unless we were meant to be immortal.
What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
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.
What we call real estate - the solid ground to build a house on - is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.
The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing; second, the gratification of one's family and friends; and lastly, the solid cash.
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.
Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
The thing you set your mind on is the thing you ultimately become.Collection: Positive
Happiness is not found in things you possess, but in what you have the courage to release.Collection: Release
Bees are sometimes drowned in the honey which they collectso some writers are lost in their collected learning.Collection: Honey
No, my little Pearl! Thou must gather thine own sunshine. I have none to give thee.Collection: Sunshine
To do nothing is the way to be nothing.Collection: Way
If the truth were to be known, everyone would be wearing a scarlet letter of one form or another.Collection: Would Be
There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.Collection: Heart
There is something truer and more real, than what we can see with the eyes, and touch with the finger.Collection: Real
Some illusions...are the shadows of great truths.Collection: Shadow
A man's bewilderment is the measure of his wisdom.Collection: Men
She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.Collection: Freedom
Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared.Collection: Men
This above all: be true, be true, be true.Collection: Healing