Great Throughts Treasury

"There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided."

"These black sinners, renewed doubts regarding women's fate. Can it satisfy even the most fortunate among her sisters? Personally for myself Hester had long since convinced that it is worth so to live, and never cared about it. He thought I was a woman, she became a conservative man, but also and sad. Perhaps because he sees all the hopelessness of his situation. If you wait for it to be improved, as the beginning you will need to liquidate the old social system and build in its place a new one. Then you will need to radically modify the male kind, or layered with centuries habits of men that have become second nature before the woman can take his place on merit and merit. But even if you remove all possible obstacles women still will not be able to take advantage of these preliminary transformations unless she herself did not undergo a more significant change, although this metamorphosis risks losing invisible nostrum its essence. So a reasonable solution to the problems women there. If the woman prevail over all the heart, then melt and her problems So Hester Prynne heart had stopped beating with a normal, healthy heartbeat, and she went about nosedive in the dark labyrinth of thought, full of insurmountable slopes and gaping abysses from which she turned away in horror. In the harsh desert of her life for her nowhere did our home, no comfort. Sometimes in her soul creeping even terrible doubt whether it would be better to send Pearl at once to heaven and take the path that she would afford just God."

"They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendor, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another."

"They are ordinarily men to whom forms are of paramount importance. Their field of action lies among the external phenomena of life. They possess the vast ability in grasping, and arranging, and appropriating to themselves the big, heavy, solid unrealities, such as gold, landed estate, offices of trust and emolument, and public honors. With these materials, and with deeds of goodly aspect, done in the public eye, an individual of this class builds up, as it were, a tall and stately edifice, which, in the view of other people, and ultimately in his own view, is no other than the man's character, or the man himself."

"They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage. But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face."

"This shall be the last of my benevolent follies, and I will never be kind to anybody again as long as I live."

"This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,?or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,?we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow."

"This was a freedom essential to the health even of a character so little susceptible of morbid influences as that of Phoebe. The old house [with dry rot in its structure and perhaps also in its inhabitants]... it was not good to breathe no other atmosphere that that."

"This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease."

"Thou, -- dost thou pray? cried Giovanni, still with the same fiendish scorn. Thy very prayers, as they come from thy lips, taint the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us to church and dip our fingers in the holy water at the portal! They that come after us will perish as by a pestilence! Let us sign crosses in the air! It will be scattering curses abroad in the likeness of holy symbols!"

"Those with whom we can apparently become well acquainted in a few moments are generally the most difficult to rightly know and to understand."

"Though we speak nonsense, God will pick out the meaning of it."

"Thus content with an inner sphere which they inhabit together, it is not immediately that the outward world can obtrude itself upon their notice."

"Thou are my only reality-- all other people are but shadows to me: all events and actions, in which thou dost not mingle, are but dreams."

"Thus I did with Susan as with most other things in my earlier days, dipping her image into my mind and coloring it of a thousand fantastic hues, before I could see her as she really was."

"To be left alone in the wide world, with scarcely a friend,?this makes the sadness which, striking its pang into the minds of the young and the affectionate, teaches them too soon to watch and interpret the spirit-signs of their own heart. The solitude of the aged, when, one by one, their friends fall off, as fall the sere leaves from the trees in autumn,?what is it to the overpowering sense of desolation which fills almost to breaking the sensitive heart of youth when the nearest and dearest ties are severed? Rendered callous by time and suffering, the old feel less, although they complain more: the young, ?bearing a grief too deep for tears,? shrine in their bosoms sad memories and melancholy anticipations, which often give dark hues to their feelings in after-life."

"To do nothing is the way to be nothing."

"To plant a family! This idea is at the bottom of most of the wrong and mischief which men do. The truth is, that, once in every half century, at longest, a family should be merged into the great, obscure mass of humanity, and forget all about its ancestors."

"Thus, by an inevitable necessity, as a magnet attracts steel-fillings, so did our man of business draw to himself the difficulties which everybody met with."

"Thus we see, too, in the world that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beautiful results--the fragrance of celestial flowers--to the daily life of others."

"Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared."

"Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat."

"To-morrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next; each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days, and added years, would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame."

"Ugliness without tact is horrible."

"Unfathomable to mere mortals is the lore of fiends."

"We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep."

"We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gaiety."

"We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straightly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep."

"We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest."

"We had pleased ourselves with the delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor....Each stroke of the hoe was to uncover some aromatic root of wisdom... But... the clods of earth, which we constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening."

"We must not think too unkindly even of the east wind. It is not, perhaps, a wind to be loved, even in its benignest moods; but there are seasons when I delight to feel its breath upon my cheek, though it be never advisable to throw open my bosom and take it into my heart, as I would its gentle sisters of the south and west."

"What a strange, sad man is he! said the child, as if speaking partly to herself. In the dark night-time, he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he kisses my forehead, too, that the little brook would hardly wash it off! But here in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with is hand always over his heart!"

"What a sweet reverence is that when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart."

"What are the haughtiest of us but ephemeral aristocrats of a summer's day?"

"What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear to taste?"

"What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!"

"What is the Unpardonable Sin? asked the lime-burner; and then he shrank farther from his companion, trembling lest his question should be answered. It is a sin that grew within my own breast, replied Ethan Brand, standing erect with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts of his stamp. A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims!"

"What would a man do if he were compelled to live always in the sultry heat of society, and could never better himself in cool solitude?"

"What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining... my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased - what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself?"

"What we call real estate--the solid ground to build a house on--is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests."

"What's that you mutter to yourself, Matthew Maule? asked Scicpio. And what for do you look so black at me? No matter, darky, said the carpenter. Do you think nobody is to look black but yourself?"

"When an author gives their advertising pages, addresses, not the crowd throw aside the book, or ever will take it in hand, but the very few who understood better than most of their classmates college or his contemporaries. And not missing at this point authors go even further in certain sensitive details that may interest only and exclusively to a single heart and a mind in perfect sympathy with it, as if the printed book was launched with the vast world certainty to be stumbling to be forming the complement of the nature of the writer completing the circle of his existence and put them in the mutual communication."

"When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring as to possess the character of truth supernaturally revealed."

"When individuals approach one another with deep purposes on both sides they seldom come at once to the matter which they have most at heart. They dread the electric shock of a too sudden contact with it."

"When scattered clouds are resting on the bosoms of hills, it seems as if one might climb into the heavenly region, earth being so intermixed with sky, and gradually transformed into it."

"When man is a brute, he is the most sensual and loathsome of all brutes."

"When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips."

"When the Artist rises high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he makes it perceptible to mortal senses becomes of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possesses itself in the enjoyment of the reality."

"When he is cheerful--when the sun shines into his mind--then I venture to peep in, just as far as the light reaches, but no further. It is holy ground where the shadow falls!"

"When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!"