William Ellery Channing Quotes

Progress, the growth of power, is the end and boon of liberty; and, without this, a people may have the name, but want the substance and spirit of freedom.

The world is governed by opinion.

The domestic relations precede, and in our present existence are worth more than all our other social ties. They give the first throb to the heart, and unseal the deep fountains of its love. Home is the chief school of human virtue. Its responsibilities, joys, sorrows, smiles, tears, hopes, and solicitudes form the chief interest of human life.

My highway is unfeatured air, My consorts are the sleepless stars, And men my giant arms upbear My arms unstained and free from scars.

A clear thought, a pure affection, a resolute act of a virtuous will, have a dignity of quite another kind, and far higher than accumulations of brick and granite and plaster and stucco, however cunningly put together.

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.

We smile at the ignorance of the savage who cuts down the tree in order to reach its fruit; but the same blunder is made by every person who is over eager and impatient in the pursuit of pleasure.

Every human being is a volume, worthy to be studied.

It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Other blessings may be taken away, but if we have acquired a good friend by goodness, we have a blessing which improves in value when others fail.

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.

May your life preach more loudly than your lips.

The hills are reared, the seas are scooped in vain If learning's altar vanish from the plain.

All virtue lies in individual action, in inward energy, in self determination. There is no moral worth in being swept away by a crowd even toward the best objective.

Error is discipline through which we advance.

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.

Home - the nursery of the Infinite.

We must not waste life in devising means. It is better to plan less and do more.

Life has a higher end, than to be amused.

Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life.

Compassionate Saviour! We welcome Thee to our world, We welcome Thee to our hearts. We bless Thee for the Divine goodness Thou hast brought from heaven; for the souls Thou hast warmed with love to man, and lifted up in love to God; for the efforts of divine philanthropy which Thou hast inspired; and for that hope of a pure celestial life, through which Thy disciples triumph over death.

The fewer the voices on the side of truth, the more distinct and strong must be your own.

Labor is discovered to be the grand conqueror, enriching and building up nations more surely than the proudest battles.

The chief evil of war is more evil. War is the concentration of all human crimes. Here is its distinguishing, accursed brand. Under its standard gather violence, malignity, rage, fraud, perfidy, rapacity, and lust. If it only slew man, it would do little. It turns man into a beast of prey.

I call that mind free, which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come.

Grandeur of character lies wholly in force of soul, that is, in the force of thought, moral principle, and love, and this may be found in the humblest condition of life.

The great hope of society is in individual character.

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

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

Let us aspire towards this living confidence, that it is the will of God to unfold and exalt without end the spirit that entrusts itself to Him in well-doing as to a faithful Creator.

O God, animate us to cheerfulness! May we have a joyful sense of our blessings, learn to look on the bright circumstances of our lot, and maintain a perpetual contentedness

Ask the majority of Christians what they consider the greatest evil from which Christ freed humanity and they will say: from Hell, from eternal fire, from punishment in the next world. As a corollary to this they think that salvation is something that someone else can achieve for us. The word hell, which is seldom met in the Holy Scriptures, has done much harm to Christianity as a result of false interpretations. People run away from external hell which they are made to fear most of all. The salvation that man needs most and that which gives him freedom is redemption from the evil within his soul. There is something far worse than external punishment. It is the sin of the soul being in rebellion against God; the soul, endowed with God's strength, yielding itself to the force of bestial instinct; the soul which exists before God, yet fears the threats and fury of men, preferring human glory to its own peaceful awareness of virtue. There is no fate worse than this. And it is this that the unrepentant person carries with him to the grave. And it is this we ought to fear.

To gain salvation, in the highest meaning of the word, means to raise your fallen spirit, cure the sick soul, give it back its freedom of thought, conscience and love. In this lies the salvation for which Christ died. It is for this salvation that we have been given the Holy Spirit, and it is towards this salvation that the Christian teaching should be directed.

How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.

Precept is instruction written in the sand; the tide flows over it and the record is gone; example is graven on the rock, and the lesson is not soon lost.

War is to be ranked among the most dreadful calamities which fall on a guilty world; and, what deserves consideration, it tends to multiply and perpetuate itself without end. It feeds and grows on the blood which it sheds. The passions, from which it springs, gain strength and fury from indulgence.

Great effort from great motives is the best definition of a happy life

The mind never puts forth greater power over itself when in great trials, it yields up calmly its desires, affections, and interests in God. There are seasons when to be still demands immeasurably higher strength than to act. Composure is often the highest result of power. Do you think it demands no power to calm the stormy elements of passion, to moderate the vehemence of desire, to throw off the load of dejection, to suppress every repining thought when the dearest hopes are withered, and to turn the wounded spirit from dangerous reveries and wasting grief, to the quiet discharge of ordinary duties? Is there no power put forth, when a {woman}, stripped of {her} property, of the fruits of a life's labors, quells discontent and gloomy forebodings, and serenely and patiently returns to the tasks which Providence assigns?

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

A man may quarrel with himself alone; that is, by controverting his better instincts and knowledge when brought face to face with temptation.

Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.

Religion is faith in an infinite Creator, who delights in and enjoins that rectitude which conscience commands us to seek. This conviction gives a Divine sanction to duty.

But the ground of a man's culture lies in his nature, not in his calling. His powers are to be unfolded on account of their inherent dignity, not their outward direction. He is to be educated, because he is a man, not because he is to make shoes, nail, or pins.

Soul Gathers Force It is possible, when the future is dim, when our depressed faculties can form no bright ideas of the perfection and happiness of a better world,-it is possible still to cling to the conviction of God's merciful purpose towards His creatures, of His parental goodness even in suffering, still to feel that the path of duty, though trodden with a heavy heart, leads to peace.

The reveries of youth, in which so much energy is wasted, are the yearnings of a Spirit made for what it has not found but must forever seek as an Ideal.

A man in earnest finds means or, if he cannot find, creates them.

In general, we do well to let an opponent's motives alone. We are seldom just to them. Our own motives on such occasions are often worse than those we assail.

The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot.

God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.

Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.

Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.

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.

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.

Be true to your own highest convictions.

In the long run, truth is aided by nothing so much as by opposition.

One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.

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

Perhaps in our presence, the most heroic deed on earth is done in some silent spirit, the loftiest purpose cherished, the most generous sacrifice made, and we do not suspect it. I believe this greatness to be most common among the multitude, whose names are never heard.

We never know a greater character unless there is in ourselves something congenial to it.

War will never yield but to the principles of universal justice and love, and these have no sure root but in the religion of Jesus Christ.

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.

Life is a fragment, a moment between two eternities.

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

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

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common - this is my symphony.

We honor revelation too highly to make it the antagonist of reason, or to believe that it calls us to renounce our highest powers.

Science and art may invent splendid modes of illuminating the apartments of the opulent; but these are all poor and worthless compared with the common light which the sun sends into all our windows, which he pours freely, impartially over hill and valley, which kindles daily the eastern and western sky; and so the common lights of reason, and conscience, and love, are of more worth and dignity than the rare endowments which give celebrity to a few.

Each of us is meant to have a character all our own, to be what no other can exactly be, and do what no other can exactly do.

The worst tyrants are those which establish themselves in our own breasts.

The world is to be carried forward by truth, which at first offends, which wins its way by degrees, which the many hate and would rejoice to crush.

Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.

Real greatness has nothing to do with a man's sphere. It does not lie in the magnitude of his outward agency, in the extent of the effects which he produces. The greatest men may do comparatively little.

True love is the parent of humility ...

Why is it that we are so busy with the future? It is not our province; and is there not a criminal interference with Him to whom it belongs, in our feverish, anxious attempts to dispose of it, and in filling it up with shadows of good and evil shaped by our own wild imaginations? To do God's will as fast as it is made known to us, to inquire hourly
I had almost said each moment
what He requires of us, and to leave ourselves, our friends, and every interest at His control, with a cheerful trust that the path which He marks out leads to our perfection and to Himself,
this is at once our duty and happiness; and why will we not walk in the plain, simple way?

Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence ... Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually.

Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.

Love is the life of the soul. It is the harmony of the universe.

Our affections are our life. We live by them; they supply our warmth.