Man’s own youth is the world’s youth; at least, he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth’s granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes. So it was with Holgrave. He could talk sagely about the world’s old age, but never actually believed what he said; he was a young man still, and therefore looked upon the world–that graybearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable–as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming. He had that sense, or inward prophecy, –which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish, –that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime. . Nathaniel Hawthorne
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More Quotes By Nathaniel Hawthorne
  1. Love, whether newly born or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world.

  2. Oh, for the years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living.

  3. Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.

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

  5. Death should take me while I am in the mood.

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