Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

I'm all in favor of looking deeply into as much as we possibly can. I'm not afraid of knowledge... With all new technology, weapons inevitably emerge... Evil comes out of the human heart. It doesn't come out of nature.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Evil is not any superhuman, but it is HUMAN.

Evil is not a thing. It cannot take possession of you. It's the opposite; it's a void, an absence of goodness. The only thing you can be frightened of here is yourself.

You had evil inside you, and you indulged it. Men will always indulge it.

It is in our hearts that evil lies, and it is from our hearts that it must be plucked out.

Hell itself does not contain greater monsters of iniquity than you and I might become. Within the magazine of our hearts there is power enough to destroy us in an instant, if omnipotent grace did not prevent

There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren't enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.

How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!

We may never understand what leads anybody to terrorize their fellow human beings. Such violence, such evil is senseless. It's beyond reason.

The devil is not abroad at night in the form of a cat or a wolf or any other animal. He lives eternally in the hearts of men.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Dislike what deserves it, but never hate: for that is of the nature of malice; which is almost ever to persons, not things, and is one of the blackest qualities sin begets in the soul.

The literary story is a story that deals with the complicated human heart with an honest tolerance for the ambiguity in which we live.

Our hearts are not stones. A stone may disintegrate in time and lose its outward form. But hearts never disintegrate. They have no outward form, and whether good or evil, we can always communicate them to one another.

I look into my own black heart.

Allow the purity of evil to guide you.

In the depths of every heart there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights, the music, and the revelry above may cause us to forget their existence.

She's so small, yet she contains so much evil.

You're a man who has suffered and wants revenge,' she said. 'Your heart is dead, your soul is in darkness. The devil by your side is smiling because you are playing the game he invented.

Man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it's up to him and only him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be.

Sometimes I think there's a beast that lives inside me, in the cavern that's where my heart should be, and every now and then it fills every last inch of my skin, so that I can't help but do something inappropriate. Its breath is full of lies; it smells of spite.