Words matter. These are the best William Ellery Channing Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.
The great hope of society is in individual character.
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.
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.
How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.
Life has a higher end, than to be amused.
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.
Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict.
One good anecdote is worth a volume of biography.
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.
The world is governed by opinion.
The office of government is not to confer happiness, but to give men the opportunity to work out happiness for themselves.
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.
Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.
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.
Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.
Nothing which has entered into our experience is ever lost.
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.
Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.
It is far more important to me to preserve an unblemished conscience than to compass any object however great.
Every human being is intended to have a character of his own; to be what no others are, and to do what no other can do.
The best books for a man are not always those which the wise recommend, but often those which meet the peculiar wants, the natural thirst of his mind, and therefore awaken interest and rivet thought.
Error is discipline through which we advance.
Every mind was made for growth, for knowledge, and its nature is sinned against when it is doomed to ignorance.
He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a life-time is unraveled.
No one should part with their individuality and become that of another.
God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
Fix your eyes on perfection and you make almost everything speed towards it.
Every man is a volume if you know how to read him.
It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind’s dignity.
Undoubtedly a man is to labor to better his condition, but first to better himself.