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"Cannot you conceive that another man may wish well to the world and struggle for its good on some other plan than precisely that which you have laid down?"
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"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself."

"Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world."

"The world is like a grand staircase, some are going up and some are going down."

"Fondue sets, martini shakers and juicing machines: three things the world could live completely without."

"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other."

"One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality."

"The world is not black and white. More like black and grey."

"What sane person could live in this world and not be crazy?"
Explore more quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"An infinite, inscrutable blackness has annihilated sight! Where is our universe? All crumbled away from us; and we, adrift in chaos, may hearken to the gusts of homeless wind, that go sighing and murmuring about in quest of what was once a world!"

"The horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it!"

"That old woman taught me my catechism!" said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment."

"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."

"It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false-it is impalpable-it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist."

"America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash--and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed. What is the mystery of these innumberable editions of The Lamplighter (by Maria Susanna Cummins), and other books neither better nor worse? Worse they could not be, and better they need not be, when they sell by the hundred thousand."

"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?"

"In the little chaos of Pearl's character there might be seen emerging-and could have been from the very first-the steadfast principles of an unflinching courage-an uncontrollable will-a sturdy pride which might be disciplined into self-respect-and a bitter scorn of many things, which, when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them."
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