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Quotes from The American Notebooks — Nathaniel Hawthorne

1804–1864 United States

← All quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

9 quotes

Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.

The American Notebooks (1835)

Every individual has a place to fill in the world, and is important, in some respect, whether he chooses to be so or not.

The American Notebooks (1835)

I do detest all offices — all, at least, that are held on a political tenure.

The American Notebooks (1835)

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

The American Notebooks (1835)

I cannot endure to waste anything so precious as autumnal sunshine by staying in the house.

The American Notebooks (1835)

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.

The American Notebooks (1835)

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.

The American Notebooks (1835)

What would a man do, if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?

The American Notebooks (1835)

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.

The American Notebooks (1835)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Nathaniel Hawthorne (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.