“Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.”

— Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 1860, Preface

About Nathaniel Hawthorne

1804 – 1864

American novelist, author of "The Scarlet Letter".

“Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally.”

“It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections; not that they gape so long and wide—but so quickly close again!”

“Would Time but await the close of our favorite follies, we should all be young men, all of us, and until Doom's Day.”

“Any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to an humble and grateful mind.”

“If music be the food of love, play on.”

“Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.”

“If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being.”

“The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness.”

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”