William Gilmore Simms Quotes

The effect of character is always to command consideration. We sport and toy and laugh with men or women who have none, but we never confide in them.

Ambition is frequently the only refuge which life has left to the denied or mortified affections. We chide at the grasping eye, the daring wing, the soul that seems to thirst for sovereignty only, and know not that the flight of this ambitious bird has been from a bosom or home that is filled with ashes.

Revelation may not need the help of reason, but man does, even when in possession of revelation. Reason may be described as the candle in the man's hand, to which revelation brings the necessary flame.

No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.

What we call vice in our neighbor may be nothing less than a crude virtue. To him who knows nothing more of precious stones than he can learn from a daily contemplation of his breastpin, a diamond in the mine must be a very uncompromising sort of stone.

... there is a native baseness in the ambition which seeks beyond its desert, that never shows more conspicuously than when, no matter how, it temporarily gains its object.

The only true source of politeness is consideration.

... the proverb answers where the sermon fails, as a well-charged pistol will do more execution than a whole barrel of gunpowder idly expended in the air.

Most men remember obligations, but not often to be grateful; the proud are made sour by the remembrance, and the vain silent.

Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy.

The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.

The birth of a child is the imprisonment of a soul. The soul must work its way out of prison, and, in doing so, provide itself with wings for a future journey. It is for each of us to determine whether our wings shall be those of an angel or a grub!

Our possessions are wholly in our performances. He owns nothing to whom the world owes nothing.

The fool is willing to pay for anything but wisdom. No man buys that of which he supposes himself to have an abundance already.

The wonder is not that the world is so easily governed, but that so small a number of persons will suffice for the purpose. There are dead weights in political and legislative bodies as in clocks, and hundreds answer as pulleys who would never do for politicians.