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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."
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"When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package."

"The ideas gained by men before they are twenty-five are practically the only ideas they shall have in their lives."

"The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius."

"What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts."

"A sudden bold and unexpected question doth many times surprise a man and lay him open."
Explore more quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests."

"Technologies of easy travel "give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should he build a more cumbrous habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner for life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere,-in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home?"

"And Pearl, stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom, while out of a still lower depth came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water."

"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."

"But year after year that summons, unheard but felt, was disobeyed. His one secret thought became like a chain binding down his spirit and like a serpent gnawing into his heart."

"Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction."

"Possibly, some cynic, at once merry and bitter, had desired to signify, in this pantomimic scene, that we mortals, whatever our business or amusement--however serious, however trifling--all dance to one identical tune, and, in spite of our ridiculous activity, bring nothing finally to pass."

"There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency-which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours-to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm."
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