William Gilmore Simms

William Gilmore Simms (April 17, 1806 – June 11, 1870) was a poet, novelist, politician and historian from the American South. His writings achieved great prominence during the 19th century, with Edgar Allan Poe pronouncing him the best novelist America had ever produced. He is still known among literary scholars as a major force in antebellum Southern literature. He is also remembered for his strong support of slavery and for his opposition to Uncle Tom's Cabin, in response to which he wrote reviews and the pro-slavery novel The Sword and the Distaff (1854). During his literary career he served as editor of several journals and newspapers and he also served in the South Carolina House of Representatives.

Quotes

Egeria

Egeria: or, Voices of Thought and Counsel, for the Woods and Wayside (Philadelpgia: E. H. Butler & Co., 1853)

• ... 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.
  • p. 15

• The true law of the race is progress and development. Whenever civilization pauses in the march of conquest, it is overthrown by the barbarian.
  • pp. 15–16

• Vanity may be likened to the smooth-skinned and velvet-footed mouse, nibbling about for ever 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 he goes.
  • p. 17

• 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.
  • p. 18

• 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.
  • p. 19

• Our possessions are wholly in our performances. He owns nothing to whom the world owes nothing.
  • p. 19

• Our true acquisitions lie only in our charities. We gain only as we give.
  • p. 19

• ... 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.
  • p. 21

• Most men remember obligations, but not often to be grateful; the proud are made sour by the remembrance, and the vain silent.
  • p. 22

• 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.
  • p. 22

• There is no doubt such a thing as chance, but I see no reason why Providence should not make use of it.
  • p. 23

• 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.
  • p. 24

• He who would acquire fame must not show himself afraid of censure. The dread of censure is the death of genius.
  • p. 25

• 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.
  • p. 26

• 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 or a grub!
  • p. 26

• Solitude bears the same relation to the mind that sleep does to the body. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery.
  • p. 28

• 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.
  • p. 28

• Our cares are the mothers, not only of our charities and virtues, but of our best joys and most cheering and enduring pleasures.
  • p. 29

• 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.
  • p. 35

• 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.
  • p. 37

• 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.
  • p. 41

• Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy.
  • p. 45

• The only rational liberty is that which is born of subjection, reared in the fear of God and the love of man.
  • p. 49

• The fool is willing to pay for anything but wisdom. No man buys that of which he supposes himself to have an abundance already.
  • p. 73

• 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.
  • p. 74

• 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.
  • p. 80

• No doubt solitude is wholesome, but so is abstinence after a surfeit. The true life of man is in society.
  • p. 89

• To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
  • p. 93

• 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.
  • p. 210

• 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.
  • p. 234

• The only true source of politeness is consideration.
  • p. 235

External links

• Maturin Murray Ballou (ed.) Treasury of Thought, 7th ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1881), pp. 18, 210, 356, 422
• Tryon Edwards (ed.) A Dictionary of Thoughts (New York: Cassell Publishing Co., 1891), p. 448