William Gilmore Simms Quotes
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Not in sorrow freely is never to open the bosom to the sweets of the sunshine.
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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.
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Most men remember obligations, but not often to be grateful; the proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent.
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Solitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery.
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Distinction is an eminence that is attained but too frequently at the expense of a fireside.
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Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.
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Modesty is policy, no less than virtue.
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To feel oppressed by obligation is only to prove that we are incapable of a proper sentiment of gratitude. To receive favors from the unworthy is simply to admit that our selfishness is superior to our pride. Most men remember obligations, but not often to be grateful for them. The proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent.
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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!
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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.
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The fool is willing to pay for anything but wisdom. No man buys that of which he supposes himself to have an abundance already.
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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.
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We must calculate not on the weather, nor on fortune, but upon God and ourselves. He may fail us in the gratification of our wishes, but never in the encounter with our exigencies.
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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.
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Genius is the very eye of intellect and the wing of thought; it is always in advance of its time, and is the pioneer for the generation which it precedes.
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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.
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Vanity may be likened to the smooth-skinned and velvet-footed mouse, nibbling about forever 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 be goes.
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Have I done anything for society? I have then done more for myself. Let that question and truth be always present to thy mind, and work without cessation.
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No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.
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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.
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Tact is one of the first of mental virtues, the absence of which is frequently fatal to the best of talents. Without denying that it is a talent of itself, it will suffice if we admit that it supplies the place of many talents.
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I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure.
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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.
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Vanity is so constantly solicitous of self, that even where its own claims are not interested, it indirectly seeks the aliment which it loves, by showing how little is deserved by others.
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Our possessions are wholly in our performances. He owns nothing to whom the world owes nothing.
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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.
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The amiable is a duty most certainly, but must not be exercised at the expense of any of the virtues. He who seeks to do the amiable always, can only be successful at the frequent expense of his manhood.
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The birth of a child is the imprisonment of a soul.
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The only rational liberty is that which is born of subjection, reared in the fear of God and the love of man.
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No errors of opinion can possibly be dangerous in a country where opinion is left free to grapple with them.
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