Aphorisms from THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE

by Nathaniel Hawthorne
originally published 1852


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 to be resisted, and when to be obeyed.

If the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure.

The kind of labor which falls to the lot of women is just that which chiefly distinguishes artificial life--the life of degenerated mortals--from the life of Paradise.

We seldom meet with women, now-a-days, and in this country, who impress us as being women at all; their sex fades away and goes for nothing, in ordinary intercourse.

Every son of woman both perpetrates and suffers his share of the common evil, whether he chooses it or no.

The rarer and higher is the nature that can magnanimously persist in error.

The poor, proud man should look at both sides of sympathy.

A brilliant woman is often an object of the devoted admiration of some young girl, who has as little hope of personal intercourse as of climbing among the stars of heaven.

A fine and rare development of character might reasonably be looked for, from the youth who should prove himself capable of self-forgetful affection.

Women judge one another by tokens that escape the obtuseness of masculine perceptions.

There is no pleasure in tormenting a person of one's own sex.

It is so rare to meet with a man of prayerful habits that such an one is decidedly marked out by a light of transfiguration, shed upon him in the divine interview from which he passes into his daily life.

Most men have a natural indifference, if not an absolutely hostile feeling, towards those whom disease, or weakness, or calamity of any kind, causes to falter and faint among the rude jostle of our selfish existence.

Except in love, or the attachments of kindred, or other very long and habitual affection, men really have no tenderness.

Happy the man that has such a friend beside him, when he comes to die!

A female reformer, in her attacks upon society, has an instinctive sense of where the life lies, and is inclined to aim directly at that spot.

There is a species of intuition--either a spiritual lie, or the subtle recognition of a fact--which comes to us in a reduced state of the corporeal system.

A bachelor always feels himself defrauded, when he knows, or suspects, that any woman of his acquaintance has given herself away.

It is quite ridiculous, and provokes one's malice, to see a creature so happy--especially a feminine creature.

A woman, by constant repetition of her one event, may compensate for the lack of variety.

Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.

There is at least this good in a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man, and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him.

If a farmer can make poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his nature insists on it.

It is not a healthy kind of mental occupation, to devote ourselves too exclusively to the study of individual men and women.

This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an over-ruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle.

When a young girl comes within the sphere of such a man, she is as perilously situated as the maiden whom, in the old classical myths, the people used to expose to a dragon.

There is hardly another sight in the world so pretty, as that of a company of young girls, almost women grown, at play, and so giving themselves up to their airy impulse that their tiptoes barely touch the ground.

Girls are incomparably wilder and more effervescent than boys, and regardless of rule and limit, with an ever-shifting variety, breaking continually into new modes of fun, yet with a harmonious propriety through all.

Young or old, in play or in earnest, man is prone to be a brute.

Especially is it delightful to see a vigorous young girl run a race.

We sometimes hold mirth to a stricter accountability than sorrow; it must show good cause, or the echo of its laughter comes back drearily.

What is the use or sense of being so very gay?

People never do get just the good they seek.

Love blesses inexperienced hearts, before they begin to suspect what is going on within them.

It is strange how expressive of moods a whisper may often be.

Custom has in no one point a greater sway than over our modes of wreaking our wild passions.

A man--poet, prophet, or whatever he may be--readily persuades himself of his right to all the worship that is voluntarily tendered.

Human destinies look ominous, without some perceptible intermixture of the sable or the gray.

Unless there be real affection in his heart, a man cannot more effectually show his contempt for a brother-mortal, nor more galling assume a position of superiority, than by addressing him as 'friend'.

Destiny--the most skilful of stage-managers--seldom chooses to arrange its scenes, and carry forward its drama, without securing the presence of at least one calm observer.

Mankind is but another yoke of oxen, as stupid, and sluggish, as our old Brown and Bright.

There are some spheres, the contact with which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure, deforms the beautiful.

Nature thrusts some of us into the world miserably incomplete, on the emotional side, with hardly any sensibilities except what pertain to us as animals.

Real life never arranges itself exactly like a romance.

By long brooding over our recollections, we subtilize them into something akin to imaginary stuff, and hardly capable of being distinguished from it.

Young men boggle at nothing, over their wine.

The pen is not for woman. Her power is too natural and immediate. It is with the living voice, alone, that she can compel the world to recognize the light of her intellect and the depth of her heart!

Women, however intellectually superior, so seldom disquiet themselves about the rights or wrongs of their sex, unless their own individual affections chance to lie in idleness, or to be ill at ease.

In the better order of things, Heaven grant that the ministry of souls may be left in charge of women!

Man is never content, unless he can degrade himself by stooping towards what he loves.

Woman is the most admirable handiwork of God, in her true place and character.

All the separate action of woman is, and ever has been, and always shall be, false, foolish, vain, destructive of her own best and holiest qualities, void of every good effect, and productive of intolerable mischiefs!

Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster without man, as her acknowledged principal!

Any man might love so magnificent a woman.

Generosity is a very fine thing, at a proper time, and within due limits.

The profoundest wisdom must be mingled with nine-tenths of nonsense; else it is not worth the breath that utters it.

The besetting sin of a philanthropist is apt to be a moral obliquity.

No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity, if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning in the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old stand-point.

Women possess no rights, or, at all events, only little girls and grandmothers would have the force to exercise them.

Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!

It needs a wild steersman when we voyage through Chaos!

No summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike.

Times change, and people change, and if our hearts do not change as readily, so much the worse for us!

There is far more of the picturesque, more truth to native and characteristic tendencies, and vastly greater suggestiveness, in the back view of a residence, whether in town or country, than in its front.

Natural movement is the result and expression of the whole being, and cannot be well and nobly performed, unless responsive to something in the character.

It is really impossible to hide anything, in this world, to say nothing of the next.

Blind enthusiasm, absorption in one idea, is generally ridiculous, and must be fatal to the respectability of an ordinary man; it requires a very high and powerful character, to make it otherwise.

A great man attains his normal condition only through the inspiration of one great idea.

There can be no truer test of the noble and heroic, in any individual, than the degree in which he possesses the faculty of distinguishing heroism from absurdity.

In society, a genuine American never dreams of stepping across the inappreciable air-line which separates one class from another.

Human nature has a naughty instinct that approves of wine, at least, if not of stronger liquor.

The custom of tippling has its defensible side, as well as any other question.

A man, however stern, however wise, can never sway and guide a female child.

It takes down the solitary pride of man, beyond most other things, to find the impracticability of flinging aside affections that have grown irksome. The bands, that were silken once, are apt to become iron fetters, when we desire to shake them off.

A state of physical well-being can create a kind of joy, in spite of the profoundest anxiety of mind.

One always feels the fact, in an instant, when he has intruded on those who love, or those who hate, at some acme of their passion that puts them into a sphere of their own, where no other spirit can pretend to stand on equal ground with them.

Our virtues, when we have any, are merely impulsive and intuitive.

In the battlefield of life, the downright stroke, that would fall only on a man's steel head-piece, is sure to light on a woman's heart, over which she wears no breastplate, and whose wisdom it is, therefore, to keep out of the conflict.

Has not the world come to an awfully sophisticated pass, when, after a certain degree of acquaintance with it, we cannot even put ourselves to death in whole-hearted simplicity?

It is nonsense, and a miserable wrong--the result, like so many others, of masculine egotism--that the success or failure of woman's existence should be made to depend wholly on the affections, and on one species of affection; while man has such a multitude of other chances, that this seems but an incident.

Admitting what is called Philanthropy, when adopted as a profession, to be often useful by its energetic impulse to society at large, it is perilous to the individual, whose ruling passion, in one exclusive channel, it thus becomes.

From the very gate of Heaven, there is a by-way to the pit!

How much nature seems to love us! And how readily, nevertheless, without a sigh or a complaint, she converts us to a meaner purpose, when her highest one--that of conscious, intellectual life, and sensibility--has been untimely baulked!

It is because the spirit is inestimable, that the lifeless body is so little valued.

Where once we toiled with our whole hopeful hearts, the town-paupers, aged, nerveless, and disconsolate, creep sluggishly afield.

As regards human progress, let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose!