- Of their legal tenure [in the House] there could be no question; but old Matthew Maule, it is to be feared, trode downward from his own age to a far later one, planting a heavy footstep, all the way, on the conscience of a Pyncheon. If so, we are left to dispose of the awful query, whether each inheritor of the property-conscious of wrong, and failing to rectify it-id not commit anew the great guilt of his ancestor, and incur all its original responsibilities. -Chapter 1
- In this republican country, amid the fluctuating waves of our social life, somebody is always at the drowning-point. -Chapter 2
- Life is made up of marble and mud. -Chapter 2
- It is very queer, but not the less true, that people are generally quite as vain, or even more so, of their deficiencies than of their available gifts. -Chapter 5
- [T]he weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which lead to crime, are handed down from one generation to another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish, in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to entail upon posterity. -Chapter 8
- It seemed to Holgrave-as doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful of every century, since the epoch of Adam's grandchildren-that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and their dead corpses buried, and everything to begin anew. -Chapter 12
- "Shall we never get rid of this Past!. It lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body!" -Chapter 12
- Here, then, we are to seek the true emblem of the man's character, and of the deed that gives whatever reality it possesses, to his life. And, beneath the show of a marble palace, that pool of stagnant water, foul with many impurities, and perhaps tinged with blood-that secret abomination, above which, possibly, he may say his prayers, without remembering it-is this man's miserable soul! -Chapter 15
- What is there so ponderous in evil, that a thumb's bigness of it should outweigh the mass of things not evil, which were heaped into the other scale! This scale and balance system is a favorite one with people of Judge Pyncheon's brotherhood. -Chapter 15
- It is a truth (and it would be a very sad one, but for the higher hopes which it suggests) that no great mistake, whether acted or endured, in our mortal sphere, is ever really set right -Chapter 21
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