William Ellery Channing Quotes

Great minds are to make others great. Their superiority is to be used, not to break the multitude to intellectual vassalage, not to establish over them a spiritual tyranny, but to rouse them from lethargy, and to aid them to judge for themselves.

Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.

Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.

The home is the chief school of human virtues.

The mind, in proportion as it is cut off from free communication with nature, with revelation, with God, with itself, loses its life, just as the body droops when debarred from the air and the cheering light from heaven.

No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.

It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind's dignity.

I laugh, for hope hath a happy place with me; If my boat sinks, 'tis to another sea.

One of the tremendous evils of the world, is the monstrous accumulation of power in a few hands.

To give a generous hope to a man of his own nature, is to enrich him immeasurably.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

It has often been observed, that those who have the most time at their disposal profit by it the least. A single hour a day, steadily given to the study of some interesting subject, brings unexpected accumulations of knowledge.

The great hope of society is in individual character.

Every human being has a work to carry on within, duties to perform abroad, influence to exert, which are peculiarly his, and which no conscience but his own can teach.

To be prosperous is not to be superior, and should form no barrier between men. Wealth out not to secure the prosperous the slightest consideration. The only distinctions which should be recognized are those of the soul, of strong principle, of incorruptible integrity, of usefulness, of cultivated intellect, of fidelity in seeking the truth.

Health is the working man's fortune, and he ought to watch over it more than the capitalist over his largest investments. Health lightens the efforts of body and mind. It enables a man to crowd much work into a narrow compass. Without it, little can be earned, and that little by slow, exhausting toil.

Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.

The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.

Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.

Error is discipline through which we advance.

No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.

Innocent amusements are such as excite moderately, and such as produce a cheerful frame of mind, not boisterous mirth; such as refresh, instead of exhausting, the system; such as recur frequently, rather than continue long; such as send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit; such as we can partake of in the presence and society of respectable friends; such as consist with and are favorable to a grateful piety; such as are chastened by self-respect, and are accompanied with the consciousness that life has a higher end than to be amused.

Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power.

Mistakes and errors are the discipline through which we advance.

Most joyful let the Poet be, it is through him that all men see.

No man receives the full culture of a man in whom the sensibility to the beautiful is not cherished; and there is no condition of life from which it should be excluded. Of all luxuries this is the cheapest, and the most at hand, and most important to those conditions where coarse labor tends to give grossness to the mind.

True love is the parent of humility....