132 quotes found
“The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.”
“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 t...”
“As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.”
“In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisi...”
“he seemed to be in quest for mental food, not heart sustenance.”
“Easy reading is damn hard writing.”
“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.”
“There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendencywhich I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighboursto grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm.”
“Then might I exemplify how an influence beyond our control lays its strong hand on every deed which we do, and weaves its consequences into an iron tissue of necessity. (Wakefield)”
“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.”
“All have some artificial badge which the world, and themselves among the first, learn to consider as a genuine characteristic.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle.”
“Do anything, save to lie down and die!”
“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 prid...”
“But never had their youthful beauty seemed so pure and high, as when its glow was chastened by adversity.”
“What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning, in this sphere of strangely-mingled elements, the beauty and the majesty which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid.”
“Is it a fact or have I dreamt it that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time?”
“He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the impulses of youth, but to the stern and t...”
