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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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William Gilmore Simms
Age: 64 †
Born: 1806
Born: April 17
Died: 1870
Died: June 11
Historian
Lawyer
Novelist
Poet
Charleston
South Carolina
Truth
Anything
Without
Done
Work
Cessation
Mind
Question
Always
Present
Society
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
The apothegm is the most portable form of Truth.... It is thus that 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.
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
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
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
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.
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
Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.
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
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.
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 only rational liberty is that which is born of subjection, reared in the fear of God and the love of man.
William Gilmore Simms
The proverb answers where the sermon fails.
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
Our true acquisitions lie only in our charities - we gain only as we give.
William Gilmore Simms
The dread of criticism is the death of genius.
William Gilmore Simms
Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy.
William Gilmore Simms
I believe that economists put decimal points in their forecasts to show they have a sense of humor.
William Gilmore Simms
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
William Gilmore Simms
No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.
William Gilmore Simms