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.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

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.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness is a butterfly which when pursued is always just beyond your grasp but which is you will sit down quietly may alight upon you.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

He had that sense, or inward prophecy,-- which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish,-- that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner.... [W]e soon found ourselves on pretty much our former terms of sociability and confidence. Melville has not been well, of late; ... and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind.... Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had "pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated"; but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists -- and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before -- in wondering to-and-fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.[after what would be their last meeting]

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

He seemed to be in quest for mental food, not heart sustenance.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the somber sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne