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Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.

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
Death
Action
Also
Something
Stagnation
Idleness
Corruption
Worse

More quotes by William Gilmore Simms

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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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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
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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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The proverb answers where the sermon fails.
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No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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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 only true source of politeness is consideration,--that vigilant moral sense which never loses sight of the rights, the claims, and the sensibilities of others. This is the one quality, over all others, necessary to make a gentleman.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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Not in sorrow freely is never to open the bosom to the sweets of the sunshine.
William Gilmore Simms
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The birth of a child is the imprisonment of a soul.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
William Gilmore Simms