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Art
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Sunlight is painting.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Authors & Writing
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It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter . . . This wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency . . . to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there . . . These perceptions came too late . . . I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
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Chastity
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A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Death
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We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Gardens
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I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse, 1854
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Generosity
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Generosity is the flower of justice.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Happiness
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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
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Health
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A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Heroes/Heroism
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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
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Humanity
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Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Identity
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No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself, and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, Ch. 20, 1850
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Life
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Life is made up of marble and mud.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Light
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Moonlight is sculpture.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Patriotism
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I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one's native State; --neither can you seize hold of that, unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Selfishness
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Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Storytelling
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Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Words
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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.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 1848
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Books by and about Nathaniel Hawthorne