Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.

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

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

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.

Happiness in this world when it comes comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit and it leads us on 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.

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's native language.

A few feathery flakes are scattered widely through the air, and hover downward with uncertain flight, now almost alighting on the earth, now whirled again aloft into remote regions of the atmosphere.