“Happiness is a butterfly which when pursued is always beyond our grasp but if you will sit down quietly may alight upon you.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne“Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and murmuring!”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter“The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne“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“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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne“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.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne“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.”
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“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”
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