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Justice & Law Quote by William Gilmore Simms

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

About this Quote

Pleasure, in Simms's line, arrives with a bill attached, and he frames that invoice as biology masquerading as morality. “Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure” turns emotion into jurisprudence: not just a feeling, but a sentence. The phrasing matters. “Natural” makes the punishment feel inevitable rather than chosen; “law” elevates a private crash into a cosmic rule. It’s a neat rhetorical move for a novelist: he smuggles a cultural argument into a seemingly neutral observation about the body.

The subtext is as Victorian as it is Southern: delight is suspect, indulgence is debt, and the world is structured to discipline appetite. In the 19th century, that idea plays well with Protestant-inflected notions of restraint and with the melodramatic logic of much popular fiction, where ecstasy reliably tips into loss. Simms, writing in an America obsessed with self-mastery and moral bookkeeping, offers a maxim that flatters the reader’s sense of seriousness: if you’ve suffered, it proves your joys were real.

But there’s also something psychologically sharp here. The line anticipates the modern idea of the “come-down,” the whiplash after intensity, when the nervous system recalibrates and what felt like freedom starts to feel like exposure. Simms dresses that comedown in ethical clothing, making tears seem less like randomness and more like repayment. It’s consoling in a grim way: pain becomes legible, even deserved, and that very harshness offers order in a world where pleasure can feel dangerously uncontrollable.

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TopicWisdom
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Simms, William Gilmore. (n.d.). Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/tears-are-the-natural-penalties-of-pleasure-it-is-66544/

Chicago Style
Simms, William Gilmore. "Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy." FixQuotes. Accessed February 2, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/tears-are-the-natural-penalties-of-pleasure-it-is-66544/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Tears are the natural penalties of pleasure. It is a law that we should pay for all that we enjoy." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/tears-are-the-natural-penalties-of-pleasure-it-is-66544/. Accessed 2 Feb. 2026.

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William Gilmore Simms (1806 - 1870) was a Novelist from USA.

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