Daily Inspiration Quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hawthorne needles a Victorian piety that insisted love was earned through self-abnegation. He flips the moral script: the trait we’re trained to condemn can be precisely what magnetizes us. “Apt to” is doing sly work here. He’s not cheering selfishness as virtue; he’s observing, almost clinically, how desire latches onto people who seem self-contained, self-prioritizing, slightly withheld. The subtext is less “be selfish” than “admit what actually pulls us.”

In Hawthorne’s fiction, attraction often runs on imbalance and projection: one person becomes an enigma, the other a supplicant. Selfishness creates that asymmetry. The selfish lover doesn’t overexplain, doesn’t overgive, doesn’t dissolve into the beloved’s needs. That boundary can read as strength, mystery, even purity of purpose. For characters steeped in guilt and restraint, the selfish figure offers a kind of illicit permission: someone who wants what they want without flinching.

There’s also a darker edge. “Inspire” hints at a love that’s induced, not chosen - love as a response to power. Selfishness can be a small, socially acceptable form of domination: it makes other people orbit. Hawthorne, writing in a culture obsessed with propriety and sin, understands that the heart is not a moral tribunal. It’s a sensor for intensity. Sometimes what feels like love is just the thrill of chasing someone who won’t meet you halfway.