Daily Inspiration Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne’s assurance that everyone “has a place to fill” sounds like comfort, but it carries a distinctly Hawthornian edge: you don’t get to opt out. The line grants dignity and removes it in the same breath. You are “important” not because you’ve earned it, but because the moral machinery of society will make use of you anyway. That final clause, “whether he chooses to be so or not,” turns self-determination into a polite fiction.

The intent is partly consolatory - a pushback against insignificance - yet the subtext is social and even theological. Hawthorne writes from a New England steeped in Puritan inheritance, where guilt, duty, and communal judgment are not abstract forces but daily weather. “Place” isn’t just vocation; it’s a slot in a moral ecosystem. Refuse it, and you still serve as an example, a cautionary tale, a pressure valve for other people’s virtue. In that sense, nonconformity doesn’t escape the system; it feeds it.

Context matters: Hawthorne’s fiction is obsessed with how private choices become public meanings. Think of how a single act - or rumor of one - can reorganize a whole community’s hierarchy of innocence and blame. This quote distills that worldview into a blunt democratic-sounding promise that’s also a warning. Individual significance isn’t a trophy; it’s a condition. You’re implicated in the world’s story even when you’re trying to sit out the plot.