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Modesty is policy, no less than virtue.

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
Modesty
Policy
Virtue
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More quotes by William Gilmore Simms

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Philosophy has its bugbears, as well as superstition.
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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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 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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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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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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Our possessions are wholly in our performances. He owns nothing to whom the world owes nothing.
William Gilmore Simms
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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
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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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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.
William Gilmore Simms
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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.
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 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
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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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The dread of criticism is the death of genius.
William Gilmore Simms
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No errors of opinion can possibly be dangerous in a country where opinion is left free to grapple with them.
William Gilmore Simms
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But for that blindness which is inseparable from malice, what terrible powers of evil would it possess! Fortunately for the world, its venom, like that of the rattlesnake, when most poisonous, clouds the eye of the reptile, and defeats its aim.
William Gilmore Simms
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Stagnation is something worse than death. It is corruption, also.
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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Solitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery.
William Gilmore Simms