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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

Sunlight is painting.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

Time flies over us, but leaves it shadow behind.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

What other dungeon is so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one's self!
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.
Nathaniel Hawthorne

You can get assent to almost any proposition so long as you are not going to do anything about it.
Nathaniel Hawthorne