William Gilmore Simms

The only true source of politeness is consideration.

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 …

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 …

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.

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 …

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 …

The fool is willing to pay for anything but wisdom. No man buys that of which he supposes himself to have an abundance already.

The only rational liberty is that which is born of subjection, reared in the fear of God and the love of man.

Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy.

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.

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.

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.

Our cares are the mothers, not only of our charities and virtues, but of our best joys and most cheering and enduring pleasures.

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.

Solitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery.

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 …

Revelation may not need the help of reason, but man does, even when in possession of revelation. Reason may be described as the candle in the man's hand, to which revelation brings the necessary flame.

He who would acquire fame must not show himself afraid of censure. The dread of censure is the death of genius.

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.

There is no doubt such a thing as chance, but I see no reason why Providence should not make use of it.

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.

Most men remember obligations, but not often to be grateful; the proud are made sour by the remembrance, and the vain silent.

... 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.