Nathaniel Hawthorne

In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it.

Moonlight is sculpture.

Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature.

Sunlight is painting.

Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, this it overflows upon the outward world.

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.

Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.

It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts.

The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.

Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love.

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.

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.

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

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.

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.