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 yond...
We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep.
The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teacher...
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.
Life, within doors, has few pleasanter prospects than a neatly-arranged and well-provisioned breakfast-table.
I sometimes fancy, said Hilda, on whose susceptibility the scene always made a strong impression, that Rome--mere Rome--will crowd everything else out of my heart.
I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am!
Death should take me while I am in the mood.
I have come to see the nonsense of trying to describe fine scenery.
And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to a...
On Andrew Jackson: "His native strength compelled every man to be his tool that came within his reach; and the more cunning the individual might be, it served only to make him a sharper tool.
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 t...
The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the breast of men.
It is remarkable, that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thoughts alone suffice them, without investing its...
But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where som...
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 d...
The only sensible ends of literature are, first, the pleasurable toil of writing second, the gratification of one's family and friends and lastly, the solid cash.
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 f...
A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!
The mind is in a sad state when Sleep, the all-involving, cannot confine her spectres within the dim region of her sway, but suffers them to break forth, affrighting this actual life with secrets that...