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

... Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man's faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil's office.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Death should take me while I am in the mood.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Do anything, save to lie down and die!

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such things. Nowadays, people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist, therefore, as you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I believe, with tobacco juice), and all other oddities of to-day, I really do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be glad to see as many heaps of quicklime in their stead.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred of quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman's beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne