William Gilmore Simms Quotes

It should console us for the fact that sin has not totally disappeared from the world, that the saints are not wholly deprived of employment.

... 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.

Better that we should err in action than wholly refuse to perform. The storm is so much better than the calm, as it declares the presence of a living principle. Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.

The only rational liberty is that which is born of subjection, reared in the fear of God and the love of man.

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.

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

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

There is no doubt such a thing as chance, but I see no reason why Providence should not make use of it.

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

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.

It is a bird-flight of the soul, when the heart declares itself in song. The affections that clothe themselves with wings are passions that have been subdued to virtues.

Neither praise nor blame is the object of true criticism. Justly to discriminate, firmly to establish, wisely to prescribe and honestly to award — these are the true aims and duties of criticism.

Our cares are the mothers, not only of our charities and virtues, but of our best joys and most cheering and enduring pleasures.

Vanity may be likened to the smooth-skinned and velvet-footed mouse, nibbling about for ever in expectation of a crumb; while Self-Esteem is too apt to take the likeness of the huge butcher's dog, who carries off your steaks, and growls at you as he goes.

Our true acquisitions lie only in our charities. We gain only as we give.