Nathaniel Hawthorne

“Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.”

“An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!”

“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”

“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.”

“Moonlight is sculpture.”

“The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that perchance belong to a deeper one.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.”

“... for when a man's spirit has been thoroughly crushed, he may be peevish at small offenses, but never resentful of great ones.”

“It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another's actual and bodily existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost.”

“In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt.”

“Death should take me while I am in the mood.”

“Accuracy is the twin brother of honesty; inaccuracy, of dishonesty.”

“The whole forest was peopled with frightful sounds--the creaking of the trees, the howling of wild beasts, and the yell of Indians; while sometimes the wind tolled like a distant church bell, and sometimes gave a broad roar around the traveler, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn. But he was himself the chief horror of the scene, and shrank not from its other horrors.”

“To the untrue man, the whole universe is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothing within his grasp.”

“In the little chaos of Pearl's character there might be seen emerging-and could have been from the very first-the steadfast principles of an unflinching courage-an uncontrollable will-a sturdy pride which might be disciplined into self-respect-and a bitter scorn of many things, which, when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them.”

“Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more.”

“The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”

“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.”