Nathaniel Hawthorne

"All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests."

"Caresses, expressions of one sort or another, are necessary to the life of the affections as leaves are to the life of a tree. If they are wholly restrained, love will die at the roots."

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

"Life is made up of marble and mud."

"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."

"Moonlight is sculpture."

"Mountains are earth's undecaying monuments."

"Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness."

"Selfishness is one of the qualities apt to inspire love."

"Sunlight is painting."

"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 it be obeyed."

"We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled dream; it may be so the moment after death."

"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."