Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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.
William Gilmore Simms
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William Gilmore Simms
Age: 64 †
Born: 1806
Born: April 17
Died: 1870
Died: June 11
Historian
Lawyer
Novelist
Poet
Charleston
South Carolina
Incontestable
Character
Censure
Right
Freely
Always
Criticism
Intelligence
Listen
Reserving
Respect
Merited
Knowledge
More quotes by William Gilmore Simms
Our possessions are wholly in our performances. He owns nothing to whom the world owes nothing.
William Gilmore Simms
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.
William Gilmore Simms
The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.
William Gilmore Simms
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.
William Gilmore Simms
Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.
William Gilmore Simms
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.
William Gilmore Simms
The dread of criticism is the death of genius.
William Gilmore Simms
The birth of a child is the imprisonment of a soul.
William Gilmore Simms
Modesty is policy, no less than virtue.
William Gilmore Simms
Most men remember obligations, but not often to be grateful the proud are made sour by the remembrance and the vain silent.
William Gilmore Simms
He who would acquire fame must not show himself afraid of censure. The dread of censure is the death of genius.
William Gilmore Simms
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.
William Gilmore Simms
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.
William Gilmore Simms
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.
William Gilmore Simms
The fool is willing to pay for anything but wisdom. No man buys that of which he supposes himself to have an abundance already.
William Gilmore Simms
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.
William Gilmore Simms
Distinction is an eminence that is attained but too frequently at the expense of a fireside.
William Gilmore Simms
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.
William Gilmore Simms
There is no doubt such a thing as chance, but I see no reason why Providence should not make use of it.
William Gilmore Simms
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.
William Gilmore Simms