Daily Inspiration Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne nails the particular American panic that you can reinvent yourself so often you eventually misplace the original. The line reads like a moral warning, but it’s also a psychological observation: sustained performance doesn’t just fool the crowd, it deforms the performer. “Wear” turns identity into wardrobe, something chosen and displayed; “considerable period” implies the real danger isn’t a single lie but the long, ordinary habit of curating yourself. By the time “bewildered” arrives, the punishment isn’t public exposure. It’s internal confusion.

The subtext is Puritan, but not preachy. Hawthorne’s world is saturated with surveillance, guilt, and the idea that the private self is always on trial. In that climate, duplicity is less a thrilling vice than a slow rot. He’s interested in what secrecy does to the soul, especially the kind of secrecy practiced for social survival: respectability over honesty, consensus over conscience. The “multitude” isn’t a handful of enemies; it’s everyone, the crowd whose approval quietly governs your choices.

Context matters: Hawthorne wrote in a 19th-century culture obsessed with moral character, reputation, and the visible signs of virtue. His fiction (The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown”) keeps returning to the split between public piety and private desire. This sentence works because it refuses the comforting idea that you can cleanly separate the masks. Keep a double life long enough, and the masks don’t just slip - they fuse.