# Quote — Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

> I seriously wished—selfish as it may appear—that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a century, or, at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question.

- Author: [Nathaniel Hawthorne](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nathaniel-hawthorne.md)
- Book: [The Blithedale Romance](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nathaniel-hawthorne/the-blithedale-romance.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne#The_Blithedale_Romance_(1852)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/nathaniel-hawthorne/the-blithedale-romance/i-seriously-wished-selfish

## More from this book

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

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nathaniel-hawthorne/the-blithedale-romance/it-is-because.md)

> 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.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nathaniel-hawthorne/the-blithedale-romance/the-greatest-obstacle.md)

> What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining... my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased - what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself?

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/nathaniel-hawthorne/the-blithedale-romance/what-in-the.md)